That Raise Didn't Come from Nancy

So you recall last week that Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House and formerly  sane individual, the one who cannot come to grips the fact that there are people who actually like President Trump, let alone voted for him, well, Nancy had something to say.

This was after the bill was passed that lowered income taxes for most of America, did a little simplification of the tax code, and removed the deplorable individual mandate to buy health insurance that was a cornerstone of the equally deplorable Obamacare program rammed down the throats of the American people with no more Republican votes (zero) than the Democrats cast for the tax cut law.

Pelosi called the bill "Frankenstein."  Now let's point out that Frankenstein was not the monster, as Mrs. Pelosi sort of implied in her comments, but she's old and forgetful, so we'll forgive her inability to distinguish between the name of the doctor who created the monster and the monster itself.

Of course, we know what she meant, or at least we'll stretch a bit and assume that we know what she meant.  It was, in her view, something terrible that we wouldn't like and would hurt us.

Naturally, the left and the media (but I repeat myself) tripped over themselves to declare how bad the bill was.  The absurdly low approval ratings for the bill in recent polls tell you all you have to know about the media and their influence, as well as, I guess, the gullibility of the American public to believe what the media say is the the truth.

The first actual, tangible reactions to the bill, however, were somewhat different.  Boeing, Comcast, AT&T and a few other companies barely waited for the ink of the president's signature to dry before declaring that they would take advantage of the bill's deep cuts in the corporate tax rate to ... wait for it ... give bonuses to its hourly employees.  Others raised their corporate minimum wages to $15.00 per hour.

Let's remember why that happened.  The Republicans who put that bill together believed that companies -- you know, the people who actually hire and create jobs -- should not have to give as much as 35% of their net back to the government but, rather, that if they could keep more of their net, they would grow more, hire more and, as happened with the tax cuts of the 1960s and 1980s, the revenues to the government in taxes would increase.

I don't know what all those hourly wage earners who got a very, very unexpected raise are going to do now, and whom they are going to vote for.  But people vote with their wallets as often as not.  And the media have, whether it was their intent or not, put that tax cut squarely in the hands of Republicans where, of course, it belongs.

But all those people who got those bonuses, and all those people who got those raises, and all the rest of the W-2 employees who on February 1st will get a pay raise when the new tax tables kick in ... they all vote, or at least most of them can.  And when they start thinking for real about things, well, they're going to remember who gave them that extra money.

When they go to the polls and think about it ... when they think about where their 401(k) balances are, and how much they're putting away now, and how much they're getting in their pay envelope that they weren't getting when Obama was president ... they're going to think a little extra.

They'll ask who gave them that raise, and they'll realize something.

That raise didn't come from Nancy Pelosi.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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