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Now that the Big Beautiful Bill has passed and made the Trump 2017 tax cuts permanent, the Cautious Optimism Economics Correspondent wonders if anyone has seen this WP headline?
No, that’s not from this week. It’s from 2017.
Nearly eight years later and I’m still waiting for the next Great Depression the 2017 tax cuts were supposed to spawn.
From the author:
” In 1926, Calvin Coolidge’s treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, one of the world’s richest men, pushed through a massive tax cut that would substantially contribute to the causes of the Great Depression.”
The author, a “Great Depression historian,” fails to mention Herbert Hoover’s giant tax hike in 1932—when the top income tax rose from 25% to 63% and all other income levels saw at least a doubling of their tax rate—that plunged the economy into Great Depression. The year after the tax increase was the worst year in U.S. economic history with the unemployment rate reaching 25.9%.
The Economics Correspondent has a copy of Robert McElvaine’s book “The Great Depression” and it’s hundreds of pages of “the free market doesn’t work” and “massive state intervention, mostly government spending, promotes economic recovery and prosperity.”
