taxes down, don t worry. taxes down! hey, hey! we ll get your taxes down, don t worry. we now know definitively which promise the president would keep. it was most certainly not his vows to fight for the forgotten man. it was a promise to a bunch of rich people eating $36 burgers, that he would cut their taxes and make them even richer. donald trump has proven time and again his populist message was basically con. a candidate who promised to fight for the working man, elected to fill his cabinet with goldman sachs billionaires, who helped craft a tax bill that enriches himself and wealthy members of congress, while leaving mostly scraps for everyone else. cnbc editor at large john harwood, you have really reported on this bill. distribution al distributionally how do you see it? this bill is essentially a corporate tax cut, a business tax cut.
i think that part is really a good point. david, in a broader sense, it s striking to me that this bill is polling worse than even tax hikes have polled. what it says to me in some ways was, and this is true with the aca and i want to get both sides here, but i do think the phenomenon of negative partisanship and polarization that exists in the country means that it s very hard to pass big popular legislation. i don t think they tried very hard here, but they re already behind the eight balls that were on this thing. well, one of the things the republicans got smart about on this thing was recognizing that they couldn t just give the entire store and have a goldman sachs shopping list. they had to sort of, you know, throw some things at people. the person who was really smart in this was marco rubio. the amount of money he got for people at the bottom is actually quite small. it s a tiny, tiny fraction of 1% of the economy. but he s going to be able for years to now pose as this
all things tax related. but i don t think barack obama got a lot of credit when people got money back in their pockets. he didn t get any credit. unfortunately, i don t know people are paying that much attention when their taxes just go down by a little. something else might happen in their withholding they don t notice it. george w. bush did the smartest thing in our political lifetimes practically by sending us a check. i got one, it had my name on it. that check with the name on it. i like it. george w. bush gave you this money. they re not even doing that. plus they made several byrd rule mistakes that mean they have to vote again, which makes them look incredibly stupid. i m hoping democrats have found 20 mistakes and they ll only release two a day so they ll have to keep doing this every day through christmas. i think that part is really a good point. david, in a broader sense, it s striking to me that this bill is polling worse than even tax
hikes have polled. what it says to me in some ways was, and this is true with the aca and i want to get both sides here, but i do think the phenomenon of negative partisanship and polarization that exists in the country means that it s very hard to pass big popular legislation. i don t think they tried very hard here, but they re already behind the eight balls that were on this thing. well, one of the things the republicans got smart about on this thing was recognizing that they couldn t just give the entire store and have a goldman sachs shopping list. they had to sort of, you know, throw some things at people. the person who was really smart in this was marco rubio. the amount of money he got for people at the bottom is actually quite small. it s a tiny, tiny fraction of 1% of the economy. but he s going to be able for years to now pose as this champion of people at the bottom. even though this bill really shows the republicans want socialist redistribution up.
actually saw this when i was sitting in the white house ingy 09. this is exactly the argument that we made about the affordable care act. that it was not polling well when it was passing through congress. we staked our hopes on the idea that once people had experienced the law, once they understood the benefits, that they would enjoy, that the law would become more popular. that s exactly what happened. by 2016, not as fast as we would have liked to have seen, but by 2016, you had democrats outwardly campaigning on the law because people had come to appreciate and experience the law themselves, that they could keep their kids on their health care plan until they were 26, they could be prevented against pre-existing conditions being discriminated against. the problem for republicans in the strategic error they ve made is the more that people learn about this law, the less they re going to like it. there s less here than meets the eye. and it s compounded by the fact that the law actua