After the GOP tax bill passed in 2017, sociologist Isaac Martin penned a column in the New York Times titled “How Republicans Learned to Sell Tax Cuts for the Rich,” in which he lay the answer in good marketing, a rejection of expertise, and the corrupted populism of Andrew Mellon. Mellon found a way to convince the American masses of the faulty proposition that “cutting income tax rates would actually increase tax revenues. In particular, he said, cutting the top income tax rates would encourage rich people to pull their money out of tax shelters and invest in creating jobs.”
