What Would It Take to Replace the Pay Working-Class Americans Have Lost?
Put another way, as long as you’re cutting taxes by $6 trillion (that is the high-end direct cost estimate of Mr. Trump’s plan from the Tax Foundation), carving out $1 trillion for workers who haven’t seen large raises in years may just pay some dividends.
.. Gross domestic product for each person in the United States was 78 percent higher in 2015 than in 1979. But the average income for those households at the 20th percentile of the income distribution rose only 6.9 percent in that span.
.. In its current form, for example, a married couple with two children that makes $30,000 a year receives a tax credit of $4,201.
.. The first step was to design a tax credit expansion that would raise the income of the bottom 20 percent of families to where they would be if they shared equally in the gains since 1979. That meant figuring out a tax change that would put an extra $2,889 in the pockets of a family of three that in 2013 made $20,420.
.. a family of four making $40,000 would receive about $6,000 a year in this expanded E.I.T.C., compared with the $2,142 they get now.
.. The Tax Policy Center crunched the numbers: The policy would deplete federal coffers by $1.02 trillion over a decade.