Trump in his first term reduced corporate tax rates from 37% to 21%! Too Bad!

By Donald A. Collins | 14 May 2025
Church and State

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

That tremendous tax cut proved wonderful for corporations but also allowed Trump’s first term to add $7 trillion to our burgeoning National Debt, which is now at $36 trillion, on which we are now paying $1 trillion in annual interest.

The efforts of Elon Musk and his DOGE department to find $2 trillion in waste in federal government mismanagement suddenly evaporated and Musk has departed his role full time as his own Tesla EV stock plummeted! His $2 trillion in promised cuts turned out to be somewhere around $70 billion according to Fareed Zakaria. But Musk has government contracts for SpaceX of over $20 billion, leaving no doubt as to why he gave the Trump 2024 election campaign $288 million.

Such donation freedom was purchased by rich corporations in 2010 with the passage of Citizens United, which allowed limitless campaign gifts.

Since the only way to substantially reduce, our national debt will be to cut Medicare, defense spending and Social Security, all sacred cows, deemed untouchable by substantial members of both parties.

This situation mark’s decades of failure to foresee or contemplate the present situation as wild spending by Democrats. The GOP did not agree to avoid hugely expensive foreign adventures in Vietnam and Iraq! Also spending only got verbal complaints.

The National Debt in 2001, when Clinton left office, was $5.7 trillion.

Solutions have been suggested, but none are likely to be implemented under the Trump Administration, whose sole objective seems to be ignoring daily PR releases to obscure his breaking Constitutional laws and taking profits which are illegal under the Emoluments clause of our Constitution.

Since there seems to be no willingness to impeach this brazen felon President, the solution to the above problems will likely only continue to be deferred until the dollar no longer becomes the international currency that has given us a significant business, edge for so many decades.

The distinguished Peter G. Petersen Foundation offered in 1/9/25 “76 Options for Reducing the Deficit” compiled by the Congressional Budget Office which could save us from the above fate.

Here are some of its suggestions:

Debt in the United States is already the size of our entire economy and is projected to grow much higher. Fortunately, there are many ways to stabilize our fiscal outlook. Recently, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released 76 policy options — spanning both revenues and spending — that could help bring the country’s rising debt under control. Below are some of the policy options that would have the largest effects.

Options for Raising Federal Revenues

CBO presents 32 options that would affect revenues. Some provisions are likely to be part of the debate in 2025 as legislators revisit expiring provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act; others would modify unrelated provisions or create new types of taxes.

Eliminate or Limit Itemized Deductions: The largest option to reduce the deficit would be to eliminate all itemized deductions, which benefit taxpayers when the value of their deductions exceeds the amount of the standard deduction. That would reduce deficits by $3.4 trillion over the 10-year period from 2025 to 2034. Subsets of such reform include eliminating just the state and local tax deduction or limiting the tax benefit of itemized deductions to a certain percentage of their value.

Impose a 5 Percent Value-Added Tax: A value-added tax (VAT) is a consumption tax imposed on the incremental increase in the value of a good or service that occurs at each stage of a supply chain until the item is sold. Applying a 5 percent VAT would decrease the deficit by between $2.2 trillion and $3.4 trillion over 10 years, depending on the size of the base to which it is applied.

Impose a New Payroll Tax: The current payroll tax is levied on the earnings of people who work for an employer and on the net earnings of people who are self-employed and used to support programs such as Social Security and Medicare. CBO estimated the amount that could be raised by a new payroll tax that would be part of general revenues of either 1 percent ($1.3 trillion raised over the 2025-2034 period) or 2 percent ($2.5 trillion raised).

Impose a Surtax on Individuals’ Adjusted Gross Income: Most individual income is taxed on an amount that is reduced by certain deductions or exemptions. CBO estimated an option that would impose a surtax on a broader measure of income (adjusted gross income). Depending on the parameters of such a surtax (as defined in CBO’s option), it could garner between $1.1 trillion and $1.4 trillion in revenues over the 10-year period.

Sadly, anyone who listened to Senator Chris Murphy’s May 1 speech in the Senate knows that corruption drives Trump’s entire operation, from illegal Emoluments to using tariffs as a possible way to insider stock market profits.

Here is what he said again:

Again I ask “when will Trump be impeached, indicted and ousted before he destroys our democracy and our economy, but most importantly our treasured integrity as an imperfect but stable, generous, welcoming, enduring force for good for the entire planet?

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?”, “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”, and “Common Sense: When will Trump be Impeached, Indicted, and Exited?”.

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