I feel like we got a bit sidetracked with this discussion of what exactly supply-side economics are and just how rich or poor are domestic grad students. Neither of those really had anything to do with the points I was trying to make. There's a difference between raising or lowering taxes on grad students vs. counting tuition credits as income and essentially decimating the entire research community in the country. As an aside, I've never heard of a $30k grad stipend, even in STEM fields. Not to say they don't exist, but that would be exceptional to me.
What I want to get back to with all this talk of supply-side economics and the desire to spur economic growth through a lowering of the corporate tax rate is this idea that 1) do corporations really need tax relief right now to spur investment and 2) do we actually want economic expansion to be our primary goal. Republicans right now seem to speak to the idea that we need this plan to stimulating corporate well-being and increasing the GDP and create more jobs. Yet, currently, we are sitting at record low unemployment, record high market valuations, and corporations are sitting on record piles of cash. What are we trying to fix here? Do Apple and Walmart really need a lowering of their tax rate or a repatriation event to allow them to hire more people or invest in more capital? It seems like Apple's limitations are the supply of enough highly educated engineers to design their products and the demand of the billions of people who buy their new phone every year. With record profit margins and cash reserves, it seems that Apple's first problem, the ability to recruit and hire more talented people (and invest in new facilities) is not a problem at all. Rather, making sure the people we complain about on this site have enough money to continue to pay for their thousand dollar phones is certainly an potential threat to their business projections. The same with Walmart. What do they need relief for? What would they do with the extra money? They certainly wouldn't give their employees a better wage as they don't have to in order to hire unskilled labor to man their stores. The profits would like go back to the shareholders, the people who are wealthy enough to buy and hold stock in the first place. Would it expand the economy? Sure. Would it increase the standard of living for a broad base of Americans? Absolutely not.
And that's the catch. All this talk about expanding the economy continues to ignore one of the most well-known facts. That all the gains from the growth of the economy over the last 20 years has gone to owners of capital, not to labor (the people Republicans claim to care about the most). So yes, we can grow the economy, and certainly it's a worthy goal, but no, that growth is not helping the people who most need help, and that's a problem. You can call it socialism or class warfare or demand-side economics or whatever, but in this time of record profits and economic growth where wealth inequality is nearing the highest it's ever been, why do we need to now focus on those who have gained immensely from this process rather than those who have been completely left behind? There has to be a middle ground somewhere between economic expansion and quality of life improvements for middle- and lower-class America. That is not what this tax bill is about.