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.

House Republicans are pursuing an impeachment “inquiry” against President Biden, largely on the grounds that his son, Hunter Biden, cashed in on his father’s name. While millions of dollars were paid by foreign entities to Hunter Biden and others while Joe Biden was vice-president, so far, the House Republican Oversight Committee has found no financial links to President Biden.

House Republican Oversight Committee Chair James Comer insists that payments to family members to corruptly influence others can constitute a bribe.

There are several problems with this. First, there’s no evidence Joe Biden benefitted. Second, there’s no evidence that he was influenced to do something. Third, Washington, D.C., is flooded with family members cashing in on elected officials’ positions, and that’s been the case for generations on all sides of the aisle.

But what’s even more hypocritical is that the House Republican Oversight Committee is ignoring even more obvious and blatant examples of corruption in Republican appointees to the Supreme Court.

Over the last twenty years, Clarence Thomas accepted from wealthy individuals at least 38 vacations, 26 private jet flights, eight flights by helicopter, a dozen VIP passes to sporting events, as well as stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica. In addition, Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire, not only paid for many of Thomas’ vacations, but also his mother’s house and a nephew’s tuition payments. Wayne Huizenga, another billionaire, provided cost-free flights on his personal jet to Thomas.

Justice Samuel Alito went on a fishing trip to Alaska with hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, a Republican donor with cases before the Supreme Court. Alito traveled to the remote Alaska site on Singer’s private jet, along with Leonard Leo, a longtime leader of the conservative Federalist Society. And the salmon fishing lodge that they all stayed at was owned at the time by another big Republican donor, Robin Arkley II, who footed the bill for Alito’s lodging. Alito did not subsequently recuse himself from a case involving Singer’s legal interests before the court.

Neither justice disclosed any of this.

Justice Neil Gorsuch tried for years to unload a 40-acre property he co-owned in Colorado. Nine days after he was confirmed to the Supreme Court, the property was purchased by the CEO of a law firm that has had numerous cases before the court — and whose clients Gorsuch has sided with much more often than not.

Now, while it may be that Congress cannot “regulate” the ethics and conduct of Supreme Court Justices, Congress can impeach justices and remove them from the bench – but there’s not a word or a hint that the Republicans have any interest in looking to impeach justices who have documented evidence of receiving payments, services, and goods from wealthy donors, especially when all of those donors appear to have had cases or issues before the Court.

But the Republicans seem determined to take on Joe Biden, while, at the very least, indicating that Republican corruption is perfectly acceptable.

And they’ll probably get away with it, just as they have by refusing to deal with Trump’s crimes.

Too often, a judgment or commentary on an event or action is dismissed because it’s a cliché, but often clichés are applicable precisely because human nature tends to repeat itself, particularly in how we make mistakes.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, swinging for the fences comes from baseball and is a term for trying to hit a home run every time at bat. It’s usually accompanied by busting a gut (another cliché), and for most hitters, it doesn’t work nearly as well as making contact with the ball with a solid swing.

This sort of excessive effort isn’t confined to baseball or even to sports. Singers making an additional effort to hit that high note usually work against themselves because extra effort tightens muscles in the throat and squeezes off the note (if I’ve remembered correctly what my wife the opera singer has told me), which makes it even harder and creates a strained and often ugly sound.

It’s also true in writing where the excess often results in “purple prose.”

“Repeating a big lie often enough that people believe it” is a cliché, given the examples of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and, of course, Trump, who lies and exaggerates to such a great degree that almost everything he utters in public is at best a great exaggeration and at worse an outright falsehood (lately, especially, most likely the latter).

True professionals in any field make the most difficult of tasks appear easy, even when they’re not, and when excessive effort destroys technique, the result is almost always a diminution in results, or, as put in another cliché, “trying too hard.” It’s much better to stay “in the groove.”

Wince at time-worn clichés, if you must, but don’t dismiss their applicability to a situation just because someone used a cliché.

Way back in time, in my first year in college, I took the introductory course in Political Science in a school that was known to have a strong department, and I was stunned, because, for the most part, the course dealt almost exclusively with the Executive Branch. So did the majority of courses dealing with U.S. politics, and none of the professors seemed really to understand grassroots politics, and some actually minimized the electoral side of politics, which struck me as a form of arrogance.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised because most of the professors teaching, those who had any experience in government, had been political appointees in the Executive Branch. At that time, I didn’t have, obviously, that kind of experience, but my father had been a city councilor and acting mayor of the town where I grew up, and my mother was an executive board member of the League of Women Voters for the state of Colorado.

Later on, after I finished my tours in the Navy, and after being less than successful as an industrial market research analyst and real estate salesman, I got involved in local politics as a precinct committeeman, and then as a researcher for a political campaign for Congress, which led to a job as a legislative assistant to a congressman (the campaign was successful) and staff director for his successor. In turn, that led, after ten years, to an appointment in the Reagan Administration as Director of Legislation and Congressional Affairs at the U.S. EPA, after which I spent another ten years working for a high-powered D.C. consulting firm.

The head of EPA when I was there was an intellectually brilliant attorney who’d been a noted and successful state representative in Colorado. Although she thought otherwise, she didn’t know squat about how the federal government worked. Neither did a great many of the senior Reagan administration appointees who came out of state governments. The result was a political nightmare, with the result that almost all of the political appointees at EPA, including the Administrator, either resigned or were fired [two of us out of 36 survived], and one assistant administrator went to jail. Also, the Secretary of the Interior and a few others were canned.

Why? Because all these people who’d been successful elsewhere carried an air of arrogance, a definite feeling that they knew better than all those elected officials and federal bureaucrats. They assumed that intelligence and past experience would suffice… and they also didn’t listen to those who’d been there. Just like the Freedom Caucus and the Trumpists.

This is scarcely new, but what is frightening to me is that the current Trumpist/populist wave is also being led by a group of arrogant grassroots politicians who understand nothing about how government works. One can complain about Biden being a creature of Washington, D.C., but in two years he got more substantive legislation passed than Trump did in four years and, from what I can tell, more than Obama did, as well.

Not only do the populists not understand government, but they don’t want to. The fact that they excuse/ignore the January 6th insurrection and the three indictments and forty charges against Trump is a good indication of their indifference and arrogance. In addition, they essentially want to destroy the U.S. rule of law because they don’t like the results, but they also have no constructive plan about what to do once they have.

So far, neither Trump nor his GOP allies in the House have yet to accomplish anything except to attempt to significantly cut federal spending with no real understanding of what cuts might be useful and what would be disastrous and to seek to impeach people they don’t like, while defending the greatest liar in American political history.

What’s happening with Trump and the Trumpists is because too many people know too little about how government works while dismissing the knowledge and experience of those they don’t like and believing they know far more than they do.

And we’re all going to pay for that arrogance.

Years ago, and often since then, I said that anger makes smart people stupid. Unfortunately, it does even more to people who aren’t that bright or those who are willfully ill-informed.

That creates a considerable political problem, especially in a democracy, where there’s often little check on stupidity fueled by anger.

Yet, today, another indictment was served to Donald Trump, the man who tried in every way he could to overturn a fair election – an election called fair by Republican local election officials from coast to coast. Trump’s also been caught on a recording asking, indeed demanding, that the Georgia Secretary of State “find” 11,780 votes. The Trump companies were found guilty of 17 years of tax evasion. Trump was found guilty of sexual harassment and defamation. He’s set a record of over 31,000 documented lies or misstatements in his four years as President. And Trump’s repeatedly called Vladimir Putin a genius and a good man.

Yet today, he’s the front-runner to be the Republican candidate for President in the next election, and recent polls show he’s running neck and neck with Joe Biden, despite the fact that, legislatively, Biden’s accomplished far more than Trump ever did when President.

So… how is that possible?

It’s possible because the Republican base is angry – furious, in fact, with the Democratic “establishment,” so furious that Republicans in the House of Representatives seem to spend most of their time trying to find ways to “get” Biden, rather than deal with the nation’s problems, so furious that they pursue ways to ban abortion totally at a time when the electorate has shown in election after election that they don’t share that view, so furious that Republican politicians, even highly intelligent ones, either share that anger or fear to oppose it.

And that kind of stupid anger can destroy a nation, and those who spread that anger are made so stupid by their anger that they’re unable to even consider that possibility.