http://eugeneweekly.com/20171109/lead-story/our-institutions-will-not-save-us "The Plot Against America's 99%" by Nouriel Roubini, Nov 6, 2017, Project Syndicate
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/republican-trump-tax-plan-by-nouriel-roubini-2017-11 The problem is that eliminating the state and local tax deduction would provide just .3 trillion in revenue over the next decade. And because this change would hurt middle-income families, many Republicans in high-tax states such as New York, New Jersey, and California will oppose it. If congressional Republicans and the Trump administration end up keeping the state and local tax deduction, their tax cuts will add .8 trillion to the public debt over the next decade...
If this far-fetched projection sounds like voodoo economics all over again, that’s because it is. Voodoo economics came into parlance in the 1980 presidential election, when George H. W. Bush criticized Ronald Reagan for claiming that his planned tax cuts would pay for themselves. Bush was vindicated just a few years later, when the Reagan administration’s tax cuts blew a huge hole in US public finances.
And yet Republican administrations have persisted in pursuing unsustainable and undesirable tax cuts benefiting primarily the rich, leading to ever-larger deficits and trillions of dollars of additional public debt. The Republicans’ eagerness to pass reckless tax cuts once in power gives the lie to their claims of fiscal rectitude.
Making matters worse, America’s pluto-populist president is peddling a tax plan that will further increase economic inequality at a time when income and wealth gaps are already widening, owing to the effects of globalization, trade, migration, new labor-saving technologies, and market consolidation in many sectors.
Given that the rich tend to save more than middle- and working-class people, who must spend a larger proportion of their incomes on basic necessities, the Trump tax plan will do little for economic growth; it may even decrease it. And it will add far more to the US’s excessively high public-debt burden. It is fake reform, brought to us by an alt-fact administration and a party that has lost its economic bearings.