Trump’s tax plan gives Wall Street everything it wants — and that’s bad news for them

The following post by Matt O’Brien was posted on the Washington Post website October 6, 2017:

Credit: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

President Trump is trying to give Wall Street what it’s always wanted: tax cuts. But doing that might take away what it’s always had: the Republican Party.

That, you see, is a pretty good description of Trump’s tax plan. It would bestow almost all of its benefits on the Republican donors at the very top of the income ladder, and it would pay for some of this largesse by actually raising taxes on the Republican voters a couple of rungs below that. Indeed, by 2027, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that the top 1 percent would be receiving 79.7 percent of all the Trump tax cuts, while the 80th to 95th percentile of households would be getting negative 5 percent. Marxists might call this “heightening the contradictions” — making things worse for people so they’ll join the revolution. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) describes it as a plan whose “purpose” is to “help the middle class.” You say tomayto, I say tomahto. Continue reading “Trump’s tax plan gives Wall Street everything it wants — and that’s bad news for them”