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While in Canada the boast is that paying more taxes has given the country a more equitable society, it’s not how the honking is done in the United States. Here, tax cuts are reputed to be the Holy Grail. It’s allegedly un-American not to love them. Beginning with Ronald Reagan, Washington has seen a half-dozen significant tax cuts. All of them won public favour, usually by a healthy margin.

Donald Trump’s administration was eager to follow suit, and did so with a giant US$1.5-trillion tax-reform package in December. This was its signature piece of legislation, its biggest achievement. It would carry the party through the midterm elections. So it was thought.

But this being the Trump era, nothing follows script. There were signs from the outset that Mr. Trump’s tax cut struck a sour note. Polls gave the plan a thumbs-down. Democrats who opposed the legislation were tickled. “To pass a bill of tax cuts and have it be so unpopular with the American people is an amazing achievement for the Republicans,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sarcastically noted. “It’s never been done before.”

Well, give it a bit of a time, the Grand Old Party regulars said, and the numbers would change.

They didn’t.

Well, give it a little more time, they said. Americans would come around when they saw its impact on their pocketbooks.

They didn’t.

In a recent Pennsylvania special election, the party initially ran ads featuring the tax cuts but pulled them due to lack of response. An NBC and Wall Street Journal poll this month showed only 27 per cent in favour of the tax reform.

What’s happened? How can tax cuts be out of favour in the U.S.? Who’s behind such a heresy? Norwegians? Is it Scandinavian collusion?

For real reasons, we might start with Americans being fed up with the fat cats getting their way. Mr. Trump’s cuts were tilted strongly toward the wealthy, both individuals and corporations. Rich guys led by Mr. Trump and his plutocrats were now stroking the swamp as opposed to draining it. Further irking the rabble was that the reform package put an expiry date of 2026 on the individual tax cuts. No such limit for the well-heeled.

In Canada, Justin Trudeau’s government did tax cuts differently. The rich took a hit. The middle-class tax cut was financed in small part at least by a tax hike on upper-income earners.

Trumpians were drawing on the example of Mr. Reagan’s cuts of 1981. They favoured the wealthy as well. But back then, there wasn’t rage in the air about the top echelon, the one-percenters, gobbling up the country’s wealth.

Mr. Trump’s team didn’t seem to take into account that the fondness for tax cuts was starting to fade. Twenty years ago, about two-thirds of Americans considered their federal tax rates too high. Today, the number is a little less than half.

Among the cognoscenti, there was broad agreement with the part of the reform package that heavily cut corporate taxes. By comparison to other jurisdictions, such as Canada, in the U.S. they were far too high. But in the American population at large, the view was the opposite. A Pew Research Center survey last year, which revealed that most Americans think their tax rate is fair, found that the population didn’t want a big corporate tax cut. They wanted a hike.

Americans also feared that they or their children would end up paying for the tax reform. There would be a shrinkage in national revenues and the right-wingers at the helm would use the low-revenue pools as a rationale to cut entitlement programs.

Economists foresee a giant deficit and debt problem looming as a result of the cuts. Many Republicans still argue that economic growth will be spurred by the reform and resultant revenues will take care of deficits. It’s the old supply-side theory. It has proved delusional before and will likely prove delusional again.

Mr. Trump’s party couldn’t give a darn about further down-the-line consequences of their fiscal management. The immediate predicament is the midterm elections. The party needs something to move the numbers beyond the 40-per-cent base that supports Mr. Trump, no matter what his megalomania brings forth.

The tax cuts were supposed to be the elixir. But on that score, it seems Americans are changing, maybe even becoming a tad more Canadian.

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