For more than fifty years, the Republicans have been preaching that tax cuts, especially for the wealthiest Americans, are good for the country. Yet years of research all across the world show that tax cuts, possibly except when the marginal tax rate is above 70%, actually hurt the poor and the middle class, while benefiting the rich.

A recent report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also rejects the trickle-down theory and states that “increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20% results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down.”

Why? Because the expenditures of middle- to-low-income sectors are the drivers of the economy, and increasing the incomes of low-income earners increases gross domestic product (GDP), while increasing the income of the top 20% of high-income earners decreases GDP.

Not surprisingly, U.S. tax cuts over the last thirty-five years have resulted in almost no increase in real income for typical working families in the U.S., while the wealthiest one percent of Americans became $29 trillion richer, and more and more assets flowed into Wall Street and the financial community.

A study from the London School of Economics says 50 years of such tax cuts have only helped one group — the rich. The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn’t, and then examined their economic outcomes. The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered, but that “prosperity” didn’t even trickle down to the middle class, let alone to the working poor.

Research from two prominent economists, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, published in 2019 shows that for the first time in a century, the 400 richest American families paid lower taxes in 2018 than people in the middle class. Even before the pandemic, income inequality had reached its highest point in 50 years, according to Census data.

And since the pandemic began, the combined wealth of America’s 651 billionaires has jumped by more than 25%, that growth exceeding $1 trillion, according to Americans for Tax Fairness.

Yet while we’re still not catching up on collapsing bridges, highways, and other infrastructure, or the medical needs of veterans, and quite a few other needs, America’s billionaires are doing just fine, and the GOP is pushing more tax cuts for the wealthy and benefit cuts for the working poor and increasing deficit spending as well to finance those tax cuts – while blaming it on the Democrats.

What’s more… most people seem to believe the GOP about tax cuts and have for fifty years, despite all the research findings to the contrary.