Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 15h 09m 29s of daytime. The moon is new with 1.0% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the nine hundred thirty-sixth day.
On this day in 1966, NASA successfully lands Surveyor 1 on the Moon.
Recommended for reading in full:
Matt O’Brien reports The Trump tax cuts are failing badly:
There are a lot of words you could use to describe the Trump tax cuts, but “successful” isn’t one of them.
That, at least, is what the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service found when it looked at how much Trump’s signature accomplishment has actually, well, accomplished so far. The answer isn’t much. Indeed, the CRS estimates that, in the past year, the tax cuts haven’t added a lot, if anything, to growth in wages, investment or the overall economy. The best you can say is that things might be better in the future.
Or, you know, they might not.
The important thing to understand here is that the Trump tax cuts were supposed to help people by helping corporations first. While households got small, temporary tax cuts — then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), you might remember, touted that one secretary was getting an extra $1.50 a week — companies got large, permanent ones. The idea being that this would make companies invest a lot more money in their businesses, which, in turn, would make their workers so much more productive, they’d eventually get bigger raises than they otherwise would have. The administration, for its part, rather absurdly claimed that this would be somewhere between $4,000 and $9,000 per household.
That’s why the most damning news isn’t that the gross domestic product is growing only a bit faster but rather that business investment is. If that doesn’t change, then what little boost there’s been to the economy won’t last long, and barely any of it will reach the middle class. Why is that? Well, the tax cuts were supposed to help in two ways: by giving wealthy shareholders more money to spend and corporations more reason to invest. The problem, though, is that the first part should increase growth for just a little while — and not by much, since rich people don’t tend to spend as much of any tax cut — so that second part really has to work for any of this to be sustainable. It’s also the only way, as we mentioned before, that any of this will trickle down to, shall we say, people in less-exclusive income groups. After all, they’re not getting much of a tax cut themselves, so their only hope is that the people who are benefiting more are putting that money to work in investments that will benefit them, too.
But that doesn’t seem to be happening so far. As the CRS points out, the types of investments the Trump administration cut taxes on the most actually grew less last year than others.
(Emphasis added.)