WisGOP reaches into recycle bin to promote more failed tax policy

With our Governor being visited by the equally Koched up, clueless and dishonest Vice President this week, someone out in WisGOP land thought it was a good idea to promote the GOP's Piece of Shit tax bill to go with it. You know, the one that has "Nixon during Watergate" levels of approval these days.

And Scott Walker used the occasion to bring back this claim.

According to analysis by the @WI_Revenue, the federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will result in a $2,508 tax cut for a typical family of four in Wisconsin. That’s $200 a month more in the pockets of the typical Wisconsin family. #WIWorking pic.twitter.com/fNnMkd18ct

— Governor Walker (@GovWalker) April 26, 2018

First of all, raise your hand if you're getting nearly $100 a paycheck more than you were in January. Yeah, me neither.

Second, that claim was recognized as BS when Walker first made it 4 months ago. I talked about it in this post, and noted the assumptions that Walker's Department of Revenue made were sketchy at best, and conveniently left out the bad things that were happening due to the tax bill.

If you punch in "$94,700, married filing jointly with 2 kids" to this tax calculator from the Reason Foundation, then it says....tax cut of around $2,500. The reasons? About 2/3 in rate cuts and an expanded standard deduction, and about 1/3 from the expanded child tax credit. But that expanded standard deduction is also a problem, because this also reduces the incentive to own a home (like the "typical Wisconsin family" does), and Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics says that US housing prices will be 4% lower in 2019 than they otherwise would have been as a result.

If you figure the median Wisconsin home is around $160,000, that's a $6,400 difference in wealth. So much for your one-time tax cut, "typical family."

The danger to housing prices dropping due to a lack of writeoffs was underscored this week, as Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation said that over half of the people who wrote off mortgage interest when they filed their taxes this year will not do so next year due to the tax law changes. And people in the income bracket Walker mentioned will have a decline of 60%.

In addition, I pointed to a quote from Todd Berry of the then-Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, who noted that using a "married family of 4" was a wrong way to look at the tax law's effects.

Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance president Todd Berry said the biggest problem with Walker's analysis is that it chose a two-income, two-child family which is no longer "typical."

"The largest number of filers in Wisconsin are single," Berry said. "And, among those who file jointly, two kids of tax credit age are less and less the norm."

More absurd WisGOP tax spin happened when Koched-up Assembly Speaker Robbin' Vos and State Senate wanna-be Dale (Koo-Koo) Kooyenga pointed to an analysis that claimed a Walker/WisGOP tax cut was adding manufacturing jobs.

Study: Manufacturing tax credit added 21,000 jobs. https://t.co/052DeaIdl7

— Speaker Robin Vos (@SpeakerVos) April 24, 2018

The problem here is two-fold.

1. The article is a year old, from April 2017.

2. The "analysis" was by Koched-up hack Noah Williams, who is using the UW's good name to try to legitimize garbage right-wing policies. The Capital Times noted in August that Williams' CROWE center in UW-Madison's Economics Department was backed by a combined $340,000 from the Bradleys and the Kochs. In addition, Williams infamously tried to get a job as an advisor for the 2016 presidential campaigns of Scott Walker and Marco Rubio, so no, he is not an honest broker.

But it's par for the course with the weaklings in today's GOP. If WIsGOP is reaching into the recycle bin like this, to prop up things that have already been found to be wrong, you know THEY HAVE NOTHING to offer in November.

And if they're desperate enough to try to pull this garbage in April, how are they going to try to spin things when the economy is likely worse in 6 months?