The theory is that reduced corporate tax rate, closed loopholes, and better tax situations for business owners will make the tax cuts revenue neutral in the long run.
This is, of course, wrong:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.cbae8b70bc1b
But the revenue neutral RHETORIC is out there, even if it's demonstrably incorrect. I'm mostly on the side of Hanlon's Razor here when it comes to the electorate: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Dollars spent on direct redistribution are notoriously ineffective at enacting change. Conservative's argue that's at the crux of "welfare reform":
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...eople-anymore/
But I think simpler than racism, is that giving money for nothing (cash benefits, basic income) has a psychologically different profile than cutting a tax on the wealthy. The argument is simple and non-racial: All taxation is theft. The market determined I was worth that much money, why should the government be entitled to any of it. (I am not making this argument, and it's clearly intellectually flawed).
Giving money as direct assistance crosses zero, and people FEEL weird about this. In market theory, it incentivizes doing nothing, and that's why middle class (white) moderates can be scared at the spectre of the unemployed (black) welfare queen, though her existence is now, and was always, somewhat dubious.
The point is, Gordon, I think you're being pretty intellectually lazy in invoking racism. I also think that we're being myopic if we say it's a nonfactor. Everyone needs to first admit that a multivariate analysis is warranted, and then tease out the motivating factors from the available evidence. I have given my numbers (15% racism), and I'm willing to admit they might be wrong, but if everyone else is going to be 100/0 or 0/100 there's really no reasonable discussion we can have.
Aside:
A free app feels very different than a 0.99 cent app, doesn't it? Wouldn't a -$0.99 cent app feel different still? I wonder what facebook's cost of customer acquisition is and how it scales with their market cap. Network theory says the worth of a network scales as the square of the userbase, so given a linear cost of user acquisition, a "negative join price" social network is probably viable (especially if it scraped->deleted your facebook...hrm, I should invent this).
EDIT: @ John I started typing before you posted, haha. Thanks!