Trump and Ryan Versus the Little People

First is the poster child family Paul Ryan keeps talking about, a family with two children making $59,000 a year. In the first year of the Cut Cut Cut Act, such a family would indeed receive a tax cut. But this cut comes from several special tax credits that are basically loss leaders to help sell the plan; they all either expire in later years or will get eroded by inflation. By 2027, with the plan fully phased in, that exemplary family would actually be facing a significant tax increase relative to current law.

 .. it’s not just Wall Street stiffs who would find themselves in that situation: So would doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other well-paid professionals. Overall, the Tax Policy Center estimates that more than a quarter of the population would see taxes go up, not down, under the G.O.P. proposal; for those with incomes between $200,000 and $500,000, that fraction rises to more than 40 percent.
.. Finally, let’s imagine a very lucky individual — let’s arbitrarily call him Eric Trump — who stands to inherit a stake in a business he doesn’t run, plus a bunch of stock. He’ll get his inheritance tax-free, because the estate tax gets phased out in the G.O.P. bill. He’ll get to pay a low tax rate on his business income. And his stocks will pay higher dividends, because the G.O.P. bill also sharply cuts corporate tax rates, and most of the benefit of those cuts will probably flow to shareholders.
.. So when Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser, says that the bill’s goalis “to deliver middle-class tax cuts to the hard-working families in this country,” he’s claiming that up is down and black is white. This bill does little or nothing for the middle class, and even among the affluent it’s biased against those who work hard in favor of the idle rich.
.. You might wonder how Republicans imagine that they can get away with this. But anyone who has paid attention to U.S. politics knows the answer.
  1. First, they will lie, unashamedly, about what their bill actually does.
  2. Second, they will try to distract working-class voters by stoking racial animosity.