I'm here to give the CEO of AT&T
a check for many thousands of dollars. Which might not seem like it makes sense,
but it would weirdly save me a lot of time and money to just hand this directly
to this very healthily paid man. I want to go
try to get past the security guards. But first, let's go somewhere
a little more interesting a giant stack of documents. Having a budget is important. If I want to save money on housing,
I can move to a smaller apartment. If I want to save on food, I can meal
prep with something like rice and beans. But there's one big expense. I've not found a way to save money
on: my taxes. After some quick research,
I found that there's two groups of people that seem to be saving a lot of money
on their taxes. The ultra wealthy
and massive corporations. We've been told for decades that cutting corporate taxes
or cutting taxes on the wealthy will be good for everyone,
not just corporations and the wealthy. So where did the idea come from? As usual,
it was from a bunch of old rich men sitting around at a fancy bar
writing vaguely incriminating notes. If you've seen my videos before,
you know I love a secret meeting where a bunch of old guys
ruin all of our lives. It's 1974 and two men who would one day go on to craft
the lie that sent us to war in Iraq. Sat down with another guy
to craft another lie, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld,
Then advisers to President Gerald Ford and economist Arthur Laffer, met
at the Hotel Washington in D.C., home to classic dishes
like oyster stew with milk, which you could, of course,
upgrade to oyster stew with half and half only $0.15 extra. President Ford
had just announced a plan to raise taxes temporary 5% bump on taxation
for corporations and the wealthy. These guys hated that. And Laffer had a theory. He drew it out on a cocktail napkin. Except this one was allegedly cloth. So not even disposable, which, like. Come on, man. he wrote. if you tax a product, less results. If you subsidize a product, more results. We've been taxing work output and income and subsidizing non-work
leisure and unemployment. The consequences are obvious. What does that mean? Well,
hear it from Laffer himself. at 100% tax rates, no one will find
there's any incentive whatsoever to work. They won't work and tax
revenues will be zero as well. and zero tax rates if there are no taxes. Of course, the government's
not going to collect any revenues. We're going to have a lot of output
employment, production, but there'll be no revenues. And that's this point down here. Now, this didn't work at first. Cheney and Rumsfeld left the napkin
at the restaurant, I don’t want that trash. But economic journalist Jude Wanniski also at the dinner, did want that trash. He took it and spent the next year
writing articles on why cutting taxes on corporations
and the wealthy was good for America. In 1981, the star of monkey
comedy, Bedtime for Bonzo, But even a monkey brought up in the right surroundings can learn the meaning
of decency and honesty. entered the White House and hired Laffer
and another conservative economist, Milton Friedman,
to advise his economic policy. Friedman, also supported corporate
and wealthy tax cuts, but mostly
because he just hated government spending, Reagan made these big promises
on how his new tax plan would help working people, we must go forward
with a tax relief package. I shall ask for a 10% reduction
across the board in personal income tax rates
for each of the next three years. Proposals will also be submitted
for accelerated depreciation allowances for business but the burden
will be lighter for each individual because the economic base will have been
expanded by reason of the reduced rates. but the tax cuts were not for working
people. The biggest cut was on income taxes
for the highest earners, a 20% cut from 7250. The tax rate on the lowest
earners was only cut 3%. Reagan also lowered estate taxes. That's taxes on inheritances
for the wealthy, capital gains taxes. That's tax on investment earnings and,
of course, corporate taxes. Reagan never actually used
the phrase trickle down, but the argument was that lowering taxes on corporations
and the wealthy would generally boost the economy
and therefore help working people. It did not. This is a chart of what percentage
of all American wealth is in the hands of the top
10% of wealthiest people. This is when Ronald Reagan took office. But the idea that tax cuts on the rich and corporations was good
for all was planted in Americans heads. But back to the giant check. They wouldn't let me give it to the CEO. And anyway,
that's not really where the CEO works. But again, and I'll get to
why giving this money straight to the billionaires
is actually saving me time and money. So I had to try again. I went to the Duke
mansion, named after the founder of the giant electricity provider
Duke Energy. But no one connected to Duke
had lived there in decades. But anyway, back to the main story. 36 years after the bedtime for Bonzo era, a star of erotic
ghost thriller Ghosts can't do it. Enter the White House. I think you like to make mischief. He noticed that too. While history might remember
the first Donald Trump campaign as mostly being about immigration and Hillary's
emails, Trump talked about taxes a lot. Specifically, tax cuts for you taxes
go way down under a Trump administration. We're going to reduce your taxes. we're lowering your taxes. Big league, Big league. in office. He passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,
which said no bills shouldn't be allowed
to have official names like generally call it HB 573 or whatever,
and just tell me what it actually does. So let's look at that. Total means the lowest income
earners saved an average of $40 a year or 40 beats,
whereas the highest income earners saved an average of $50,000 a year. I'm not counting out 50,000 beans. Then there's the estate tax. Lobbyists for billionaires
want to call this the death tax. And if you think this is the government
coming to seize all the money you save for your family. Trump tried to present it as something that working
people and farmers have to worry about. Now on most family
farms and small business owners will will be spared and going be spared. And it really is the word punishment of the deeply unfair estate
tax known as the death tax. So you can keep your farms in the family. that sounds messed up. But it almost definitely doesn't
affect you. I didn't. Didn't then either. Only the extremely wealthy
estates are taxed. This only applies to like the top
1% of people or less. Look at this chart for all that
campaigning on the estate tax, Trump saved money for literally 3300
extremely wealthy people, and yet he's still talking
about the estate tax this election. we got rid of the death tax
or the inheritance tax on small farms and businesses. And that's a big thing. Then there's the tax on corporations,
the corporate tax rate. Trump's tax bill cut it from 35% to 21%. Trump insisted this would be good for jobs
and working people. to lower your business
tax from 35% to 15%. New companies are going to form. People are going to get jobs. His chief
economic adviser at the time went on CNBC. And went hard on the trickle down
argument. $2,000 are going to be other economists
who say, well, maybe it's $9,000. There's going to be a public debate
about that. But there's nobody
that's saying that it's zero. We have the benefit of hindsight now. Did you get a $4,000
pay raise, a $9,000 pay raise? This was nearly a decade ago
now, and you may be making more money, but in those first years, did you get that
raise to help jog our collective memory. I spoke with a guy
who knows a lot about taxes. My name is Bharat Ramamurti I was the deputy director
of the National Economic Council now work as a senior advisor at the American
Economic Liberties Project. Well, now that it's been seven years
since that tax cut was passed in 2017, we have a lot of data
about who actually benefited from it. And what we can see
is that the typical worker, which is basically anybody
making under about $150,000 a year, saw a $0 increase in their wages
because of that tax cut. know, one of the arguments
was that by cutting taxes, it would allow corporations
to invest more in things like research and development
and so on. At the end of the day, largely what you saw was that all of those
tax savings for large corporations were sent back to shareholders in one form
or the other, And because your typical shareholder tends to be quite wealthy, about half of the households
in the United States don't own any shares, and the top 10% of households
own about 85% of all shares. What that really was was a direct transfer
from taxpayers to the wealthy. If you add in all the little tricks
corporations use to evade even more taxes,
they are barely paying anything. It gets worse than what's just on paper. The institute for Policy
Studies looked into 64 mega corporations and found that despite combined
profits of $657 billion,
that's chomping distance from a trillion. They paid an average effective tax
rate of just 2.8% Of those 64 companies, 35 paid their top executives
more than they paid in corporate taxes. That's one guy getting a bigger salary
than the entire company was paying in taxes. And while that could all come off
as just general corporate tax avoidance, the Institute on Taxation
and Economic Policy found it could be tied directly to the Trump tax bill,
showing the companies like Verizon, Comcast, Lockheed Martin and Walmart
saved billions on their tax bills. There was an increase in wages, however,
and that's for the senior most executives whose overall compensation skyrocketed after the corporate tax
cut went into effect. Are you a customer or worker
for any of these companies? Did they pass any of that on to you? I highly doubt it. Some of the corporations even got huge
refunds, meaning they paid negative taxes. The government paid them and they passed
that money on to their top executives. Meaning, if you're an American taxpayer,
a portion of your money was directly transferred to those CEOs. That's why I was trying to give this check
to this billionaire CEO. Because why should I bother
doing all the effort of filing my taxes if the money's
just going straight to this guy anyway? the transfer of wealth
was at its worst at AT&T. They were constantly talking
about the merits of the Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. And then when it actually passed, they cut jobs,
they closed stores, they lowered wages. And I bet you your phone Bill Price
didn't go down, did it? Duke Energy got massive tax cuts
and still jacked up consumer rates on electricity,
a service people need and only have. The one option for The Tax Cuts and Jobs
Act and Tribune been called the Billionaire Money
and Job Cuts Act. Yeah, I know. Yeah, we can cut that I still have that check
because the CEO wasn't here because not only is AT&T
no longer in this building, even though it's called the AT&T building,
but Randall Stephenson, that CEO, left the company
with a bit of a golden parachute, $64 million But not only does the corporate tax rate
not help working people, other more insidious tax law tweaks
actively hurt capital gains tax. That's investment. Profits has always been lower
than income tax, but a loophole introduced in the Trump
tax cut made it even worse. ProPublica reporters
noticed something odd CEOs with ownership stakes in their companies
paying themselves less in salary. In the year after Trump's election. But at the same time, profits were way up. that's because of how the Trump tax
law changed things. A dollar quoted as profit,
rather than salary. Always save money. But the new bill tripled those savings. some of the greatest beneficiaries
of this change, like the Uihlein family, are some of Trump's biggest donors. And because these owners CEOs were now more invested in the value
of their company, they were more motivated to cut wages, lay off
workers and raise consumer prices. But here's the good news. Many of Trump's
tax cuts will expire in 2025. That's next year. But middle class, upper class, lower class, business class, big tax cut,
you're going to have the biggest tax cut. not to go all MSNBC on, you hear. But if Trump is elected again,
he'll make this problem even worse. President Trump
wants to lower that corporate tax rate. The one that takes your money
and gives it to CEOs even more to just 15%. that's why the ultra wealthy are
coming out strong to get Trump elected. Billionaire Nelson Peltz,
who apologized for supporting Trump after January 6th, need a total
turn around and held a private meeting for Trump
with a bunch of other billionaires like Steve Wynn, Elon Musk and Isaac
Perlmutter. Trump also wants to cut taxes for people
making over $3.6 million a year by $70,000. That's some people's entire salary
just being handed to the wealthy. And it's not just about
who saves money on taxes. Extending the Trump tax cuts
would put America into even further debt. the Congressional Budget Office
says the cuts would add nearly $5 trillion to the federal deficit. More debt
means more money for the ultra wealthy. United States now spends more on interest on our debt
than on the entire defense budget. That interest goes to banks
and wealthy shareholders. I lied to you a lot in this video. The buildings I went to to deliver
the check had nothing to do with the billionaires stealing from us. I teased you with 50,000 beans
I did not have. And this stack of documents, it's mostly
scripts for the King of Queens. but all of the numbers and facts
I told you are true. It's trickle down economics.
That's the lie. So while most of us are sitting here
with our pathetic oyster stew with milk, the billionaires, executives
and their enablers in Washington have the extra $0.15 to upgrade to oyster stew with half and half or even cream
while lying to you that they're the reason you get any oyster
stew in the first place. Isn't it time we all got to put cream in our oyster stew? Thank you so much for watching. And if you want to support more quality journalism like this,
please don't forget to like and subscribe. And if there's something
you want to hear us talk about, let us know in the comments.
