Republicans left middle-class families behind with a tax scam aimed at making the rich richer.
Credit: Greg Nash
Mountains of evidence continue to expose the the Republican tax scam as terrible deal for working-class families but a boon for rich corporations.
Case in point: Some 99 percent of companies said the tax scam was not prompting them to increase minimum wages for employees, according to Aon, a human resources consulting firm.
Aon’s survey of 1,000 companies was reported by the Wall Street Journal, and is consistent with other surveys of how companies are using the massive giveaway orchestrated by Trump and Republicans in Congress.
Later this week, the House of Representatives will vote on a second round of tax cuts once again favoring the rich. This new tax plan is a sequel to the tax law that the Republican-led Congress enacted in December, which is informally known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). The TCJA was badly skewed to wealthy Americans, exacerbating the decades-long trend toward greater inequality of income and wealth. The law created new loopholes for well-heeled taxpayers to exploit. Moreover, its massive cost was financed by higher budget deficits that will put even more pressure on vital programs that serve all Americans. The newly proposed tax plan shares each of these failings. Congress should reject it. Instead, federal lawmakers should work toward real tax reform, beginning with undoing the damage caused by the TCJA.
Tax Scam 2 is just more of the same
During the week of September 24, Republican leaders plan to bring up a package of three bills that they call “Tax Reform 2.0”—that critics rightly call Tax Scam 2—for a vote in the House. The centerpiece of this package is H.R. 6760, a bill to permanently extend the individual and estate tax provisions of the TCJA beyond their scheduled expiration at the end of 2025. The reason these provisions were made temporary was that congressional leaders chose to move the TCJA through Congress using the process known as budget reconciliation, which enables bills to pass the Senate with a simple majority but only if they are not estimated to increase deficits over the long term. Under these procedural constraints, the TCJA’s authors chose to make the legislation’s corporate tax provisions permanent and its individual and estate tax provisions temporary (with some exceptions). H.R. 6760 would permanently extend both the provisions of the TCJA that cut individual taxes, including the reductions in individual tax rates and higher standard deduction, and the TCJA’s tax increasing provisions, including the elimination of personal exemptions and the cap on the deduction for state and local taxes (the SALT deduction).
The House Ways and Means Committee reported H.R. 6760 along straight party lines on September 13. The bill has been scored by the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) to increase deficits by $631 billion over 10 years. As discussed below, the cost over a longer time horizon would be much greater.
An internal RNC poll shows voters know the GOP tax scam overwhelmingly benefits the rich — not middle-class families.
Mitch McConnell, R-KY., 2018. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite, AP
The Republican tax scam was always set up to favor wealthy corporations at the expense of middle-class families. And now Republicans are learning most voters see through their spin and understand the tax scam for exactly what it is.
Bloomberg obtained a private, internal poll from the Republican National Committee (RNC) showing “By a 2-to-1 margin — 61 percent to 30 percent — respondents said the law benefits ‘large corporations and rich Americans’ over ‘middle class families.’”
In response to the data, the pollsters wrote “we’ve lost the messaging battle on the issue.”
The current congressional majority has made its priorities painfully clear. In 2017, the legislative calendar was dominated by an attempt to strip health care from millions of people in order to provide significant tax cuts to the wealthy. When that failed, Congress turned to a tax bill known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), which was essentially a corrupt giveaway that provided massive windfalls to wealthy donors, special interests, and members of Congress themselves. The law will provide more than $84.7 billion in tax cuts to the top 1 percent of Americans in 2019, while increasing health insurance premiums for millions of people and resulting in nearly 9 million fewer people with coverage.
Many of the staffers who were most involved in the TCJA’s passage have left the Hillfor lucrative jobs as lobbyists for the special interests to whom they provided special tax breaks. Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-OH), who helped draft the TCJA, left shortly after its passage to become the head of the Ohio Business Roundtable—many of whose members benefited substantially from the bill.
Perhaps the most ostentatious example of this corruption came from Florida Rep. Vern Buchanan (R). Rep. Buchanan sits on the House committee that was charged with drafting the TCJA—a bill that gave him millions of dollars in special tax breaks. On the same day that he voted to pass the bill, Rep. Buchanan purchased a brand new 73-foot yacht with a base price of nearly $3 million.
After voting to give massive handouts to the wealthy and corporations at the expense of the middle class with last year’s Tax Scam, Republicans are back for more. Rep. Paulsen, as a member of the Ways and Means Committee, voted yesterday topermanently cap the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction, costing Minnesota families thousands of dollars per year. Rep. Paulsen also put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block by voting to increase the deficit by at least $631 billion, on top of the $1.9 trillion deficit increase that resulted from the GOP tax scam.
“Rep. Erik Paulsen voted to permanently slash the State and Local Tax deduction that hard working families in Minnesota rely on to save thousands of dollars a year and put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block by adding another $631 billion to the deficits Republicans have already racked up thanks to their tax scam,” said DCCC spokesperson Rachel Irwin.“Voters know that as long as Paulsen is in office, their access to affordable healthcare and retirement security are at risk.”
The following article by Oliver Willis was posted on the ShareBlue.com website July 30, 2018:
Ultra-rich CEOs are raking in even more millions of dollars, thanks to the GOP’s tax scam.
Credit: Evan Vucci, AP
The Republican tax scam, passed with only GOP votes and Trump’s signature, has led to a massive Trump Bump in pay for multi-millionaire CEOs while average Americans have been left out to dry.
In a review of SEC filings since the passage of the GOP tax scam, Politico found that executives “have been profiting handsomely by selling shares since Trump signed the law on Dec. 22 and slashed corporate tax rates to 21 percent.”
Further, according to Politico, public companies have announced $600 billion in buybacks this year alone, and approximately 28 percent of S&P 500 companies have announced plans to offer buybacks to shareholders.
The following article by Jeff Stein was posted on the Washington Post website June 14, 2018:
“It may be revenue positive, it may be revenue negative,” former National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn said of the tax reform law. (Washington Post Live)
An escalating trade war could wipe out the benefits of the Republican tax law passed last fall, President Trump’s former top economic adviser said Thursday.
Gary Cohn, who served as Trump’s director of the National Economic Council but left amid a rift over the president’s trade policies, said that retaliatory tariffs between countries could drive up inflation and prompt American consumers to take on more debt, possibly pushing the country into another economic downturn. Continue reading “Trade war could wipe out gains of GOP tax law, former top Trump economic adviser say”
The following article by Ryan Koronowski was posted on the ThinkProgress website June 13, 2018:
Credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds, AFP, Getty Images
The federal government just admitted that workers are earning lower wages since the passage of the GOP tax cuts.
When President Donald Trump was pushing Congress to pass his tax plan last year, which focused on lowering corporate rates and the income taxes of high earners, he pulled out a handy statistic: according to the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, the average family would make $4,000 more under the new plan. Continue reading “Workers’ wages fall after passage of GOP tax cuts”
The following article by Addy Baird was posted on the ThinkProgress website June 7, 2018:
The issue Republicans see as central to their success is a major part of what activists say drives them to fight against the GOP.
Pres. Trump listens to US Rep. Renacci (L). Credit: Nicholas Kamm, AFP, Getty Images
CLEVELAND, OHIO — When Katie Jones realized Rep. Jim Renacci (R-OH) was going to be the Republican Senate nominee in her state, she said she felt “sick.”
