GOP's Old Reaganesque Tax Cut Economy Fading Away...

While Republicans celebrate the passage of their creeky old 80's Reaganesque agenda that's leaving everyone behind, the new internet/high tech economy is moving past their "forgotten" voting base. The following story is subscription only, but you can get the idea...:

ROXOBEL, N.C.—Danielle Baker wanted a $324,000 loan last year to expand the peanut-processing business she ran from the family farm. She had a longstanding relationship with the Roxobel branch of Southern Bank, and she thought Southern would help fund the peanut operation she had spun off, too. But that branch—the town’s only bank—closed in 2014. A Southern banker based in Ahoskie, 19 miles away, said Bakers’ Southern Traditions Peanuts Inc. was too small and specialized. A PNC bank branch also turned her down.

Instead of bringing high-speed broadband to every nook and cranny of the US, funding debt-free colleges, and taking the expensive health insurance burden off American employers, Republicans can't get past their simple tax cut madness. We can't take care of a simple thing like helping Wisconsinites live longer:

Anyone else getting a little war-on-drugs deja vu over the opioid epidemic?

Bonus Ploy: After the GOP's tax cut made the richest companies even richer, we were treated to stories about year-end bonuses of $1000. But wait, this one-time smokescreen simply hid the old economies job losses, pushed by the GOP's tax cut:

1. AT&T will layoff and fire more than a thousand workers starting early next year ... Across the Midwest, an estimated 600 workers were notified they were being laid off by the company on December 16, a week before the company announced it was doling out $1,000 bonuses to 200,000 of its employees in celebration of the Republican Party’s tax overhaul. 

2. The announcement comes days after the New York Post reported that the company "pink-slipped more than 700 DirecTV home installers." 

3. On Friday, the Post also reported that AT&T has recently laid off "215 high-skilled technician jobs in nine Southern states" and plans to fire nearly 700 workers in Texas and Missouri beginning in February.

4. Last year, senior executives at AT&T told The New York Times that "shrinking the [company's] workforce by 30 percent is not out of the question." The Justice Department sued AT&T in November in an attempt to block its acquisition of Time Warner. Soon after the company announced it would give $200 million worth of bonuses, President Donald Trump praised the move as an indicator of how the tax bill could benefit American workers.

Companies Expanding Too, Thanks to Taxpayers?: It's great to see new jobs cropping up throughout Wisconsin as well, but with the help of working Wisconsin taxpayers. Again, this is what passes for the "free market." Yet Wisconsin in last for the 3rd year in a row in job-creating new startup companies...that's the new economy ignored by Walker:

JS: Global sales of cheese, sausage, gummy bears, generators and factory equipment are some of the drivers behind the latest Wisconsin business expansions, new data from the state's economic development agency shows. Fifty projects eligible for state tax credits in 2017 represent $11.7 billion in investments and thousands of new jobs, according to Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. But one big project — the Foxconn Technology Group factory planned for Mount Pleasant — makes up $10 billion of that amount. 

Foxconn aside, what's left are $1.7 billion in expansion projects and about $114 million in WEDC tax credits.

Click to enlarge the list, to see how much WEDC is giving away or loaning. Again, not all funding is bad, but still, some of it's out of control. Where's the magic of this mythical free market we hear so much about? Notice how some companies are simply "retaining" jobs here.