Somehow, the Democrats have found a new fad . . . er, cause . . . to rally behind. They grabbed the torches and pitchforks and went after Trump’s success on the border. In typical Trump fashion, he responded via Twitter. It was a good zing; he said the Democrats are only good for three things: high taxes, high crime and obstruction.
But, it got me thinking. Sure, that’s a nice burn, but how true is it? I crunched the numbers so I could share the results with you good people.
High Taxes
This one certainly feels true. So far, in 2018, the Democrats have campaigned heavily on promises to raise taxes. They were avid opponents of the Republican tax cuts and have ridiculed and demonized the reform at every opportunity. They seem to be in complete denial that the cuts put more money in the pockets of 97 percent of Americans.
Instead, they plug their ears, stamp their feet and lie very loudly about how destructive the tax cuts have been. But, we don’t need to get into that today. We’ve all discussed it at length.
Instead, let’s really review Trump’s claim. Are the Democrats really the party of high taxes? Well, reviewing the facts and history requires us to build a little context. Adjusted for inflation and as a percentage of the GDP, the highest tax initiative in U.S. history was in 1942. The Revenue Act of that year was essentially designed to fund the war effort, and it was not cheap. Most of us can accept the necessity of that war effort.
Since WWII, there have been a number of tax hikes and decreases. A few dwarf the rest. In raw dollars, the highest tax hike in the history of the nation was the Affordable Care Act. The ACA levied taxes at businesses of all sizes and particularly targeted the lowest income earners in America with steep new taxes. So far, it has raised hundreds of billions of dollars, and most of the taxes didn’t take effect until 2014. Many of them were also repealed last December.
As bad as the ACA was, if we adjust for inflation, there are two culprits that are much more egregious. The first was the Reagan tax hike of 1982. At a cursory glance, it appears to have been bigger than the nightmare we know as Obamacare.
But, a little context changes this picture. Reagan agreed to the tax hikes on the Congressional promise that spending would be cut (which is a promise Congress broke). It also came on the tail end of sweeping tax cuts. If you put the two together, you still get a net tax cut, which is how the country tends to remember Reagan.
The other huge tax hike in modern history came in 1968. The Revenue and Expenditure Control Act was Lyndon B. Johnson’s pet, and in terms of GDP, it was the biggest tax hike since WWII. While those are the biggest in history, Bill Clinton came in just behind the pack with his deficit reduction bill that passed in 1993.
Let’s tally the score. Modern rhetoric aside, Democrats lay claim to 4 of the 5 biggest tax hikes in history, and the one Republican hike on the list was paired with cuts that left a net decrease in taxation across the country. It looks like Mr. Trump was dead right on this one.
High Crime
This is a trickier subject. Common sense and a slew of studies have shown us that gun control tends to correlate with higher crime. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Democrats are the party of high crime. After all, Mr. Super Left, Bernie Sanders, has repeatedly defended gun ownership over the years. To give this claim a fair assessment, I took a different approach.
I compared the local and federal legislatures of the 60 counties with the most crime in the country. Why 60? It boils down to a statistic you may have seen. Roughly 51 percent of all violent crime in the U.S. occurs in just 60 counties (out of more than 3,000 total). So, by breaking down these statistics, we can see that 14 of these counties are represented by Republicans in the House. The other 46 are Democrat. A closer inspection reveals that 5 of the 15 most crime ridden counties and 2 of the top 10 are represented by Republicans. The rest are firmly blue.
It goes even further. Of the 14 counties that have a Republican Representative, all but 3 have staunchly blue local governments. This is what is commonly referred to as a preponderance of evidence. The vast majority of violent crime in our country happens in Democrat-run areas. It doesn’t surprise you, but now you have the hard facts. Score two for Mr. Trump.
Obstruction
This is the hardest point to give to the President. There’s no question that the Democrats have worked fervently to obstruct everything Trump has tried to do. It’s downright ridiculous. But, if we’re being fair, we have to admit that Republicans behave at least somewhat analogously when the Democrats are in power. The real test, then, isn’t to see what parties do when in the minority. Instead, we should measure them by their actions when they have majorities.
For Obama’s first two years, the Democrats had a supermajority in the House and Senate, and they held the presidency. This means the party could literally have passed anything they wanted as long as they could agree with their own. Republicans could do nothing but watch. With that power, the Democrats squabbled. The only major bill that passed was the ACA, but then it couldn’t actually be executed. It didn’t actually go into effect until Republicans re-took the House and amended it into the broken functionality we have all learned to hate.
Conversely, Republicans under Trump haven’t had the luxury of a supermajority in the Senate. They’ve had to get past Democrat obstruction at every turn. Despite it, Republicans have reformed taxes, health care and immigration. By the end of this year, we might even see a few more huge wins. So, we can give this point to Mr. Trump, but only barely. Both parties obstruct, but only Republicans actually construct from time to time.
That settles it. Trump was right again. He even had to fix this most recent immigration problem through the obstruction of the Democrats. Even while they condemned immigration policy, they flat out refused to write legislation to fix it. Clearly, their goals are not a functioning America. They just want to fight and destroy.
