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Dec. 25, 2021 - The Dan Bongino Show
09:23
The Bongino Brief - Dec 25, 2021

Two destructive leftist narratives about the economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Dan Bongino.
Welcome to the Bongino Brief.
I'm Dan Bongino.
Listen, I love this segment, OK?
I'm going to just put this out there in advance.
Some of you love economics.
Some of you don't.
But I was on my radio show yesterday and I got a ton of good feedback about this.
I had mentioned this is an old thing on the podcast.
You've heard about it a lot.
But I'd mentioned that there are two really pernicious Destructive leftist narratives about the economy.
And if there were two, I wish would just go away because they're false and they'd never be brought up again.
If I had the power to just snap my finger and make it go away, I dream a genie style, you know, wiggle the nose or whatever.
The first one would be that the Reagan tax cuts cost the government money.
In other words, we went into debt because of the Reagan tax cuts.
Why is that narrative?
Why does that bother you?
Why do you care, Dan?
I care.
It's nothing to do with Reagan.
Frankly, it's nothing to do with tax cuts.
It has everything to do with their ability to ingrain in the American psyche a narrative that is false, and they use it to discredit other tax cuts.
In other words, this happened, the Reagan tax cuts, from 1980 to 1988, over a series of years.
The numbers are there.
The Reagan tax cuts did not cost the American people any money.
The federal government raised more tax revenue because the economy grew.
So although the tax rates were lower, the economy expanded so much, we actually raised more revenue.
I'm going to prove it to you in a minute.
The reason that's important now, Reagan's dead.
The reason it matters now is because every time a tax cut's proposed, they keep bringing up the same argument.
Oh my gosh, those Reagan tax cuts cost us money, went to massive government debt from the Reagan tax cuts.
It's false.
The second narrative I'd love to dispel, and I dream a genie style, make it go away, would be that there was a Clinton surplus.
There was never a Clinton surplus.
It didn't happen.
I'm not going into that again.
Just look at the national debt every year of the Clinton administration.
It goes up every year.
How the hell does the debt go up if there was a surplus?
It went up every year.
There's no surplus.
It's made up.
What do you mean they made it up?
That's exactly, they just made it up!
Yet liberals still believe it happened.
Why is this important?
Here we go.
Joe Scarborough from Morning Schmo.
He was a former Republican congressman, or alleged Republican congressman.
He's now a full-time leftist activist, and he was on his morning show claiming that some of the tax cuts he voted for, notably the Bush tax cuts, which also raised the largest four-year increase in tax revenue in American history at the time, the Bush tax cuts, But he keeps bringing up again how these Republican tax cuts redistribute wealth from the middle class to the rich and are causing inequality, basically insisting that the rich get off while the middle class pay more.
Doubt me, listen to him say it right here.
Well the tax policies that I have supported through the 80s and 90s and that continue to be supported by Republicans in the 21st century have created the greatest income redistribution in the history of this planet from middle class Americans to the Elon Musks of the world.
It's grotesque.
They did?
Keep in mind, this guy, again, this is the reason why I tell you to never trust people in Congress.
They are 535, between the House and the Senate, of the dumbest people on planet Earth.
Most of them, not all of them.
They don't know it.
This guy was a congressman, and he's just lying to you on his television show.
So just to be clear about his premise, because we do facts on this show, His premise is that the 80s and 90s tax cuts took money from the middle class and gave it to the rich.
In other words, the rich paid less and the middle class paid more.
Okay, did that happen?
Here we go, receipts time.
It's all bulk.
Washington Examiner, Christopher Tremagli.
Working class won big under Trump's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
He's insisting that the Trump tax cuts did this too and made Elon Musk rich.
They did!
According to the Heartland Institute, taxpayers with an adjusted gross income of $40,000 to $50,000 received an average tax cut of 18% under the Trump tax cuts.
Wow!
Data show that taxpayers with an adjusted gross income of $1,000 to $25,000 decreased by more than $2 million in one year, while the number of households reporting incomes higher than $25,000 increased in every income bracket.
So the middle class received a pretty massive tax cut under President Trump.
Yeah.
And it appears that people who are poor got richer.
That's not what Joey Scarborough said.
No, no, no.
Former Congressman Morning Schmo host.
He's saying rich people got all their money from the poor people.
Elon Musk stole it.
He doesn't have any data to back that up, of course.
Ah, you may be saying, all right, he's lying about the Trump tax cuts, whatever.
But he's definitely not lying about the Reagan tax cuts.
You heard him.
He said the tax cuts in the 80s.
You heard him.
He said it, right?
I supported taxes.
He's talking about Reagan.
For the liberals listening who don't know, Reagan was president in the 80s.
So did the rich get over on the poor in the 80s or in the Reagan tax cuts?
So I said, let's be fair.
Washington Examiner's relatively right-leaning.
I said, let's try a leftist source just to show you how dumb these people are.
Here's Glenn Kessler, one of the dumbest human beings on planet Earth, but he writes for the Washington Post.
He was trying to fact check Rand Paul.
Except this fact check didn't work out as planned.
Here he acknowledges that the rich, after the Reagan tax cuts, paid more.
The Elon Musks of the 80s paid more, not less.
Here, I'll read you the quote.
Washington Post.
Certainly the share of taxes paid by the top 1% went from 17.9% in 1981 to 25.2% in 1989.
The Reagan years.
For an increase of 41%!
According to, according to who?
IRS data!
Oh my gosh, well it must be real then.
But the income share of the top 1% increased even more.
From 8% to 14%.
A gain of 71%.
Exactly!
According to who? IRS data. Oh my gosh, well it must be real then.
But the income share of the top 1% increased even more.
From 8% to 14%. A gain of 71%.
Exactly! That's the point!
So, just to be clear, Glenn Kessler's big mad
because rich people paid a greater percentage of the tax load, Joe, wait for it,
because they got richer.
Oh my gosh!
You can't have that happen!
Hang him by the toenails!
Il bastardo!
Get the, how do you, oh my gosh, how do you let this happen?
What a bunch of turd burglars, my gosh.
So the rich people paid more taxes and Glenn Kessler thinks it's a problem.
They not only paid more in number, but a greater percentage, but it's definitely a problem because they got richer in the Reagan years, along with everyone else.
How do I know that?
Just go back to the tax brackets and the tax brackets that shrunk in the Reagan years.
You'll notice something.
The middle class shrunk in the Reagan years.
Oh my gosh, what happened?
They got poorer?
No, they all got richer!
Look at the number of people in the middle class tax brackets.
And look at the number of people in the wealthier tax brackets after Reagan got out of office.
You'll notice they all went up.
Now, proving Joe Scarborough wrong on the, well, listen, we redistributed income from the middle class and the government lost a bunch of money.
He didn't say that, but the leftists will tell you that.
Really?
Wall Street Journal, Phil Graham and Michael Salon.
When Reagan left office, real federal tax revenue was more than 19% higher than the day of his inauguration.
Real revenue.
That's inflation adjusted for you leftists.
A major recession was overcome, inflation was broken, the tax code was indexed, and the largest tax cut of the post-war era had been implemented.
Now do you understand why dunces like Joe Scarborough continue to attack the Reagan, Trump, and Bush tax cuts?
Because they don't want to admit the obvious.
That the economy exploded, and in a double whammy of success here, What happened?
Tax revenue went up too.
Even the government benefited.
Now, let me give you a common critique here, so you're ready.
A common critique you'll hear from leftists is, well, tax revenue went up during the Reagan years because Reagan hiked the capital gains tax.
Oh, he did.
20 to 28 percent.
He cut the income tax and cut a number of other taxes too.
Which is weird, that's kind of a stupid claim, because when you go to the Tax Foundation and you look at the charts, you'll see that the largest increase in tax revenue by far came from... Oh, income taxes!
In 1980, $244 billion when Reagan gets into office.
$444 billion when Reagan gets into office.
And in 1989, when he leaves, the income tax revenue is $445 billion.
So let's look at the capital gains tax revenue.
Surely that was all of it, right?
Well, no, not so much.
You don't have that fact on your side either.
Capital gains tax revenue, 12 billion when he got into office and he got out of office, 35 billion.
So the overwhelming majority of taxes and the tax increases came from individual income taxes from wealthier people who, although their tax rates were lower, were paying more.
They just, folks, they just make it up.
They just make it up all the time.
The numbers are never on their side.
Factoids, you know, data, it matters.
The Dan Bongino Show.
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