Senator Tim Scott’s bald-faced lie about tax cuts shows he believes his constituents and MAGA are stupid. Lawrence O’Donnell and Norm Ornstein called him out and ridiculed him.
GOP Senator ridiculed for his bald-faced lie about tax cuts.
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Summary
Republican Senator Tim Scott repeated the long-debunked claim that Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) “paid for itself.” Still, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and conservative scholar Norm Ornstein promptly dismantled the talking point on air, showing that federal revenues fell below projections while deficits ballooned. Scott’s invocation of the Laffer Curve ignored mountains of empirical data and the Congressional Budget Office’s numbers, revealing the emptiness of supply-side orthodoxy.
Key take-aways
- Reality vs. rhetoric: Independent analysts at the Tax Policy Center and CBO estimate the TCJA will add $1 – $2 trillion to the national debt over a decade, contradicting Scott’s boast of rising revenues.
- Raw dollars mislead: Revenues ticked up in nominal terms in 2018, but once inflation and baseline growth are considered, receipts fell, exactly as previous Reagan- and Bush-era cuts did.
- Benefits to the wealthy: According to Brookings, the law delivered the most significant gains to the top income brackets, while leaving working-class wages essentially unchanged.
- Deficits and austerity: Because tax revenues lagged, GOP lawmakers now push Social Security and Medicaid cuts, threatening rural hospitals and red-state constituents first.
- Media accountability: O’Donnell and Ornstein illustrate why journalists must challenge false economic narratives in real-time rather than uncritically platform them.
Progressives see Scott’s performance as proof that the modern GOP sacrifices fiscal honesty to protect donors, even when data show trickle-down policies starve public investment and undercut the very voters Republicans court.
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Corporate-friendly politicians long ago mastered the art of masking upward wealth redistribution as economic populism. Senator Tim Scott’s latest sermon on the supposed self-financing magic of tax cuts follows the script: invoke the Laffer Curve, trash the Congressional Budget Office, and claim history vindicates supply-side economics. Yet every serious data set exposes the ruse. The Tax Policy Center tallies between one and two trillion dollars of foregone revenue over the TCJA’s first decade, before interest costs are added. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget finds that actual collections since 2018 track almost exactly with CBO’s original loss forecasts, shredding the “paid for itself” fairy tale.
Lawrence O’Donnell’s sharp rejoinder, amplified by veteran political scientist Norm Ornstein, did more than ridicule one senator; it illuminated the structural dishonesty embedded in conservative tax messaging. Scott touted a three-percent rise in receipts during 2018–2019, but the increase merely mirrored normal nominal GDP growth. After adjusting for inflation and comparing them to the pre-TCJA baseline, federal revenues declined. FactCheck.org flagged Scott for a similar distortion during the 2020 Republican National Convention, noting that revenues declined in real dollars and as a share of GDP.
Why repeat a claim so easily debunked? Because supply-side dogma remains the ideological glue binding corporate donors to culture-war voters. By portraying tax cuts as self-funding, Republicans justify upward transfers while presenting themselves as deficit hawks. They then weaponize the very deficits their policies create to demand cuts in social programs. The Tax Policy Center shows that as individual-rate cuts expire, the permanent 40 percent drop in corporate taxes continues to slash receipts—an implicit giveaway to shareholders and CEOs. Brookings researchers highlight the distributional tilt: upper-income households captured the most significant after-tax gains, while median wages increased only slightly.
The human cost is initially evident in red counties. When Medicaid reimbursement shrinks to plug revenue holes, rural hospitals close, leaving conservative voters to drive hours for emergency care. Teachers see larger class sizes when state budgets hemorrhage. Veterans waiting for VA appointments confront understaffed clinics. Yet GOP leaders pin their woes on immigrants, queer students, or “woke” librarians—any scapegoat that distracts from fiscal malpractice.
Progressives counter with a simple, reality-tested principle: prosperity flows from the middle out and the bottom up. Providing working families with higher wages and robust public services stimulates demand, which in turn drives private investment. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman demonstrate that post-war America achieved its fastest growth when the top marginal tax rate exceeded 70 percent and union density remained high. Today’s low-tax, low-union landscape has yielded slower growth, stagnant wages, and record levels of inequality. The TCJA intensified that trajectory.
In this context, O’Donnell and Ornstein provide a vital public service. By labeling Scott’s assertion a “bald-faced lie,” one refuses the journalistic both-sides impulse and models the fact-first approach democracy requires. Yet their segment also highlights a broader failure. Too often, mainstream outlets air false economic claims without real-time scrutiny, allowing misinformation to harden into conventional wisdom. When reporters treat the Laffer Curve as a legitimate theory rather than an empirically discredited talking point, they enable policies that drain public coffers and undermine social solidarity.
Looking forward, progressives advocate three reforms. First, sunset all corporate giveaways embedded in the TCJA and restore a 28 percent corporate rate, a move CBPP estimates would raise $1.3 trillion over ten years while barely denting investment. Second, close loopholes that let billionaires pay lower effective rates than teachers. Third, tie any future tax reductions to automatic triggers: if projected growth fails to materialize, the cuts roll back. Such safeguards would inoculate the budget against ideological wish-casting.
Ultimately, the debate is moral, not merely technical. Every dollar lost to supply-side alchemy is a dollar not spent on affordable housing, clean water, or universal child care. By exposing Scott’s deception, O’Donnell, Ornstein, and our platform equip voters with facts they can wield at the ballot box. The lesson stands: when politicians insist the rich need relief so prosperity can “trickle down,” citizens should follow the money, not the mythology. Data—not rhetoric—shows that broad-based investment in people, not tax gifts to plutocrats, builds an economy that works for everyone.
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