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koch brothers
Trump Allies Launch $20 Million Effort to Convince Working Class to Back Tax Scam 2.0
"Don't be fooled: What this Koch-backed group is really only after is protecting tax cuts for wealthy people like me," said the chair of the Patriotic Millionaires.
Jan 13, 2025
A right-wing advocacy group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers announced Monday the launch of a $20 million campaign to promote an extension of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax cuts, which disproportionately benefited the rich and large corporations.
But in a 60-second ad that debuted over the weekend, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) characterizes the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as a boon to "hardworking Americans" and small businesses—and warns that allowing provisions of the law to expire at the end of this year as scheduled would be disastrous for the working class.
"This year, Congress is facing a countdown to a crisis that threatens family budgets nationwide," Ross Connolly, AFP's regional state director, said in a statement Monday. "We are proud to partner with the incoming Trump administration to protect prosperity and ensure that Congress acts."
AFP is a 501(c)(4) organization that describes itself as a "grassroots" movement despite being launched by Charles Koch and his late brother, David—two of the most notorious right-wing billionaire in U.S. politics.
The group said its new 50-state campaign represents "the largest effort by a conservative organization" to support President-elect Donald Trump's legislative agenda as he prepares to take office next week. The campaign, according to AFP, will include "over 1,000 meetings" at congressional offices, "in-district events" with activists and lawmakers, and "roundtables with job creators."
The campaign aims to "reach millions of voters on the phone and at their doorsteps," AFP said.
"The Trump tax giveaways passed in 2017 did not help working-class Americans. In fact, the top 1% of corporations received almost all of the benefits."
AFP's description of the impacts of the 2017 tax law flies in the face of resounding evidence showing that wealthy Americans—not ordinary workers—were the chief beneficiaries and are poised to reap most of the rewards once again if Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress extend the measure's soon-to-expire provisions.
"Americans for Prosperity is spending $20 million on a new ad campaign that champions the 2017 Trump tax law as a win for working families," Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, told Common Dreams. "But don't be fooled: What this Koch-backed group is really only after is protecting tax cuts for wealthy people like me."
"I'm in favor of tax relief for working people, but not yet another huge and unnecessary windfall for America's rich," Pearl added. "If Congress wants to help working families, they should make tax rates on labor income the same as tax rates on profits made by investors."
AFP is one of a number of right-wing, corporate-tied organizations pushing for an extension of the Trump tax cuts, which Republicans are planning to fund by slashing Medicaid, federal nutrition assistance, and other key programs.
The progressive watchdog group Accountable.US noted in a recent analysis that one of the groups pushing for an extension of the 2017 law is Advancing American Freedom, an organization "run by corporate consultants, lobbyists, lawyers, and executives, including former Trump administration officials who were directly responsible for the TCJA."
Accountable also observes that Club for Growth, a group funded by wealthy conservatives, "has pushed a deeper corporate tax cut plan as an 'opening salvo' in the current tax debate."
"The billionaire funders of the group's action arm have benefited enormously from the TCJA, saving hundreds of millions of dollars from a single obscure tax break for pass-through entities," the watchdog added.
In response to AFP's new nationwide campaign, Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk told Common Dreams that "a glitzy ad campaign from a far-right organization won't change the fact that the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress are paying for giveaways to billionaires, wealthy tax cheats, and price-gouging corporations by cutting critical services for working families, like Medicaid and SNAP."
"The Trump tax giveaways passed in 2017 did not help working-class Americans," said Carrk. "In fact, the top 1% of corporations received almost all of the benefits."
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2024: The Year of the Billionaire
At this point, just 813 U.S. billionaires hold a combined $6.7 trillion in wealth while 15 of them each have over $100 billion for a combined wealth over $2.4 trillion.
Jan 04, 2025
Based on an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of data from the ForbesReal-Time billionaire list from December 31, 2024, the last day of market activity, there are 813 billionaires with combined wealth totaling $6.72 trillion.
The total number of billionaires has remained constant at 813 when Forbes published their 38th annual World’s Billionaire List on April 2, 2024. But the combined wealth of U.S. billionaires increased over the last 9 months by $1 trillion, from $5.7 trillion at the beginning of April 2024 rising to $6.72 trillion at the end of 2024.
The top five billionaires and their individual wealth are:
- Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $428 billion (up from $252.5 billion in September 2024).
- Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $235.2 billion.
- Larry Ellison of Oracle fame moving into number three spot with $210.5 billion, surpassing Marc Zuckerberg.
- Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $204.4 billion.
- Larry Page of Google, with $157.6 billion.
There are now 15 U.S. billionaires with more than $100 billion each and combined wealth totaling $2.4 trillion.
Among the wealthiest dynastic families on the Forbes list, these dynastic families closed 2024 with huge pools of wealth:
- Walton. Seven members of the Walton Family with combined wealth of $404.3 billion
- Mars. Six members of Mars family with combined wealth of $130.4 billion
- Koch. Two members of Koch family have a combined wealth of $121.1 billion
Many top billionaires have seen their wealth surge during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.
On March 18, 2020, Elon Musk had wealth valued just under $25 billion. By 2024 year’s end, his wealth was $428 billion.
Jeff Bezos saw his wealth rise from $113 billion on March 18, 2020 to $235.2 billion in the Dec 31, 2024 analysis survey.
Three Walton family members—Jim, Alice and Rob—saw their combined assets increase from $161.1 billion on March 18, 2020 to $317 billion in the September 13, 2024 survey.
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Privatizer Pete Hegseth Is Bad for Military Families and Veterans
Most media reports ignore that Hegseth was a leading advocate for turning veterans care over to private doctors and hospitals.
Dec 02, 2024
Much media coverage of Pete Hegseth’s nomination as Secretary of Defense has focused, understandably, on controversial things he has said or done, along with his complete lack of administrative experience relevant to running a federal government department with a $920 billion budget and a workforce of three million.
But anyone in charge of the Pentagon also gets to oversee the Military Health System (MHS), which provides either private health insurance coverage or direct care for over 9.5 million service members, military retirees, and their families. As Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin noted in a recent DOD National Defense Strategy report, the MHS mission is to ensure that active duty personnel and their dependents are well-served by a skilled cadre of “medical personnel in uniform,” who number nearly 170,000.
Hegseth served as an ROTC-trained Army officer deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay and is a longtime critic of “government healthcare,” claiming that it “doesn’t work.” So if Hegseth succeeds Austin, Pentagon officials trying to end a failed experiment with MHA privatization may find themselves ordered to march backward.
Rather than being upgraded and improved, the DOD’s network of military hospitals and clinics would remain under-resourced. And more of the MHA’s $61 billion annual budget would be spent on private insurance coverage that has failed to meet the needs of many service members and their dependents, particularly in rural areas.
A White House Advisor
During the first Trump Administration, Hegseth was a White House advisor who pushed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to expand care outsourcing for nine million former service members. Trump’s first VA Secretary, a hold-over from Barack Obama’s administration, dragged his feet on implementing this ill-advised policy.
As a result, Dr. David Shulkin, an experienced hospital system administrator in the private and public sectors, was fired by Trump in 2018 after keeping him around for over a year. In his memoir, It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Serve Your Country, Shulkin blames his downfall on Hegseth, who “never worked at the VA, knew nothing about managing a healthcare system, and had little understanding of the clinical and financial impact of the policies he was advocating.”
Hegseth does have a background as “a capable midgrade officer” who earned two Ivy League degrees and Bronze Stars, plus media experience ranging from writing for the Princeton Tory, a conservative undergraduate publication, to opining about military and veterans’ affairs on Fox & Friends Weekend where he’s a host. In any other Republican administration, this resume would qualify him as a Pentagon press secretary.
That Hegseth has instead risen to a cabinet pick is a testament to the continuing impact of the Koch Brothers-backed Concerned Veterans for America (CVA). After a failed bid to become the GOP nominee in a 2002 Republican primary race for a U.S. Senate seat in his native Minnesota, Hegseth became CVA’s first CEO and a leading advocate for turning veterans care over to private doctors and hospitals.
CVA was an astroturf upstart in veterans’ affairs and an outlier in pushing VA privatization. Traditional Veterans Services Organizations (VSOs)—like Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, Disabled American Veterans, or Vietnam Veterans of America—represent millions of veterans. Their members pay dues and elect their leaders. They have local chapters and national conventions. They have roots in the community and provide valuable services to individual veterans who need help filing disability claims for service-related conditions, which qualifies them for VA care.
VSO lobbying victories include the passage of the PACT Act of 2022. This legislation made VA benefits and related medical coverage easier to obtain for nearly a million veterans, including many whose health was damaged due to burn pit exposure during post-9/11 wars in the Middle East. (Hegseth initially applauded and then criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a flip-flop characteristic of his career. As Iraq war veteran and VoteVets co-founder Jon Soltz says about him, “I have been debating Pete Hegseth for years, and I can’t tell you what he stands for other than himself and his own ambition.”
An Astro-Turf Group
With few actual dues-payers, no VSO-style membership service programs, and a political agenda bankrolled by libertarian billionaires, CVA helped pass few bills that benefited the nation’s 19 million veterans. Instead, during the Obama era, the media-savvy group became a battering ram against tax-payer-funded healthcare in any form, a longtime bête noir of the Kochs.
Hegseth became their most visible and effective mouthpiece in a wide-ranging campaign to discredit VA care and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In 2013, CVA ran video ads warning, in Hegseth’s words, that all Americans would soon “face long wait times, endless bureaucracy, and poor service” if Congress expanded health care access by subsidizing private insurance coverage. The result, he claimed, would be billions of dollars wasted on “a nationalized health care plan that will bring the same bureaucratic dysfunction to the larger U.S. healthcare market”–as if the VA were a model for “Obamacare,” which it certainly wasn’t.
A year later, this propaganda offensive, closely coordinated with right-wing Republicans on Capitol Hill, claimed the scalp of retired four-star General Eric Shinseki, the Vietnam veteran who was Barack Obama’s first VA Secretary. Shinseki became the fall guy for a localized scandal involving misconduct by a few VA hospital managers in Phoenix. Their doctoring of data on medical appointment wait times—to earn bonus payments—led to CVA-amplified false claims that 40 Phoenix area vets had died due to delayed care. The result was that mainstream media packed journalism at its worst, and there was growing pressure for more out-sourcing of VA care despite its higher quality, lower cost, and greater accessibility than private alternatives.
On Capitol Hill, bi-partisan majorities passed the VA Choice Act of 2014 and, four years later, the VA MISSION Act. Both opened the floodgates for increasingly costly and disastrous privatization of the nation’s most extensive public healthcare system. CVA helped engineer the passage of each measure. After stepping down as CEO of Concerned Veterans of America ten years ago and becoming a Fox News commentator, Hegseth continued to advise President Trump on veterans’ affairs; other CVA alums served in official positions at the White House or VA headquarters in Washington.
Hegseth’s return to the conservative media eco-system of his college years has paid handsome rewards; he has become a multi-millionaire (despite two divorces) as a Fox & Friends talking head, paid speaker, and bestselling author of The War on Warriors, a critique of what he calls a "woke military." Like other high-paid former military officers, his benefit package in the private sector leaves Hegseth unlikely ever to need the VA, federally subsidized insurance coverage obtained through the ACA, or, when he retires, Medicare coverage. If confirmed, his pay as DOD Secretary will be a mere $246,000 per year, but with lucrative “revolving door” opportunities in the future, when and if he transitions back to the private sector from the Pentagon.
Pentagon Cost Savings?
Meanwhile, enlisted personnel and veterans from poor and working-class backgrounds bear the brunt of failed CVA-backed experiments with the privatization of the Military Health System and the VA. Under Trump and Biden, the DOD was flush with money for military aid, expensive new weapons systems, and base maintenance worldwide. Nevertheless, the Pentagon cut healthcare delivery costs for its workforce, retirees, and dependents.
Military hospitals were closed, staff positions cut, and several hundred thousand more patients were shifted to TRICARE, a federally funded form of private insurance. Newcomers to the private sector soon reported having greater difficulty getting timely medical appointments or accessing care in areas of the country with a shortage of primary care providers and specialists.
The Pentagon found that contracting out left its hospitals and clinics “chronically understaffed” and less able to “deliver timely care to beneficiaries or ensure sufficient workload to maintain and sustain critical skills. After reassessing the situation, the DOD launched an effort to “re-attract” patients back to the MHS. As studies have shown, in-house care produces better outcomes at lower cost, with fewer racial disparities—an essential advantage for a patient population of nearly 40 percent non-white.
If Hegseth becomes DOD Secretary by recess appointment or Senate confirmation, he will undoubtedly stop bringing TRICARE beneficiaries back into the MHS. He will also halt efforts to rebuild the DOD’s in-house healthcare delivery capacity.
And Hegseth will not be the only ideological foe of “government healthcare” in a high-level Trump Administration position. His fellow cabinet nominee, former Congressman Doug Collins, an Iraq War veteran from Georgia, will be eager to pick up where Robert Wilkie, Trump’s second VA secretary, left off with his privatization efforts in 2021. And, with the biggest impact, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the TV celebrity picked by Trump to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, will further undermine traditional Medicare by replacing it with for-profit Medicare Advantage plans, on a more universal basis.
On all three fronts, these Trump appointees will weaken the public provision of healthcare that currently benefits more than 80 million people, making expanding such programs even more difficult.
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