On December 22, Trump signed his signature tax bill into law. He proclaims that the bill will cut taxes for all economic classes, spur job growth and bolster the economy. The veracity of these claims is to be seen, but if one is to use history as a standard of truth then these claims would prove decidedly false.

Trump’s version of “voodoo economics” is nothing new, and has been tried and failed multiple times. During the Roaring ‘20s, Republicans made significant tax provisions that led to the Great Depression and this occurred again under George Bush’s administration which led to the Great Recession. The truth of the matter is that tax cuts, especially for the wealthy, “[do] not improve economic growth or pay for themselves,” and having blind, ignorant faith in this has led to several economic failures.

Republicans purportedly tout that the revenues generated from tax cuts will pay for the deficit it create, regardless of history or the Joint Committee on Taxation concluding that the tax bill will result in the deficits explosion or even Paul Ryan admitting to not knowing whether the tax bill will fund itself. He even went so far as to state that “entitlement reform” is necessary to “tackle the debt and the deficit.”

The reality of the supply-side theory is that it depends on cuts to federal programs in order to even survive a recession it inevitably produces. Conservatives know this, and have adopted the theory to further their age-old agenda of shrinking the size and the scope of the government – that is the mail goal.

Arguments against tax cuts has been inadequately framed by many Democrats by relying on the four decades-old argument that tax cuts “mainly function as handouts to businesses and the wealthy.”

However true this may be, it grants merit to their baseless, insubstantial claim by accepting it as a theory and not a political strategy. The deception of these tax cuts as beneficial to the economy or even as a handout to the wealthy has allowed conservatives to be able to achieve what they have been aiming for since the passage of the New Deal – destroy any and all forms of safety net/federally-funded programs.

Until the argument is framed in a way that does not accept or tolerate the falsity of voodoo economics, this country will continue to find itself in a whirlpool of tax cuts, deficit explosions and entitlement cuts. Again, again and again