A Portland Press Herald column today outlines how Senator Collins’ vote for Donald Trump’s corporate tax giveaway led Mainers to see she has changed, and kicked off her “slide in popularity.”

 

Despite Senator Collins’ desperate attempts to blame everyone but herself for her downfall, it’s her record in Washington of siding with Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and the special interests that has left her reelection in danger.

 

Portland Press Herald: The View From Here: Collins’ 2017 tax vote started the slide

 

Support for a giveaway to the rich changed the way some Collins supporters viewed their senator.

 

By Greg Kesich

October 18, 2020

 

  • How did Susan Collins go from being one of the most popular senators in the country to one of the most endangered?

 

  • It was her support for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act – better known as the Trump tax cuts – that started to change the way Mainers thought about their senior senator.

 

  • In the first year of the Trump administration, Republicans controlled the House and Senate, and the only thing that could get in their way was principled opposition from Republican senators like Collins, who had just joined with two colleagues to stop the runaway freight train of Obamacare repeal.

 

  • But when the Republican Party came up with a plan for a massive $1.5 trillion tax giveaway to the rich that would bust a hole in the deficit they had claimed to care about when Barack Obama was president, Collins did not stand in their way. Instead, she took a leading role in championing the bill.

 

  • Collins even went on “Meet the Press” later that fall to promote the unsupportable claim that tax cuts pay for themselves.

 

  • Cutting corporate taxes was supposed to increase investment in plants and equipment and boost worker pay. It was also supposed to generate more revenue to run the government because it would stimulate growth.

 

  • It failed on all three counts.

 

  • Corporations invested at a slower rate after the tax cut than in the years leading up to it. Companies spent even more of the money they got from the government to buy back some of their own stock, jacking up the price of the remaining shares. That….does nothing to improve productivity or create jobs.

 

  • The tax bill was supposed to generate bigger paychecks for workers, but that didn’t really happen, either. 

 

  • The benefits went exactly where the critics said they would. Taxpayers with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 received refunds that were 2.5 percent higher. Those with incomes over $200,000 got 45 percent more back.

 

  • And did the tax cuts pay for themselves? Sorry. “Given that the economy grew in 2018, the data imply that the 2017 tax cut substantially reduced revenues,” Brookings found.

 

  • All of this was predictable, which is why Collins’ support for the bill has been a turning point. After 40 years in which supply side economics has proven to be good for the rich and bad for everyone else, Collins doubled down on trickle down.

 

  • Now she’s down in most of the polls, and it’s not just because she’s a victim of negative campaigning, or because Donald Trump is unpopular.

 

  • The slide has been going for a while, and it started with the 2017 tax bill.

 

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