Why the GOP Tax Bill Is So Unpopular
The public seems to be against the plan precisely because they know what’s in it.
President Donald Trump says he doesn’t want to cut taxes on the rich. His Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he doesn’t want to cut taxes on the rich. The Democratic Party says they don’t want to cut taxes on the rich. Americans saythey don’t want to cut taxes on the rich.
The House and Senate Republican tax bills are taking a different approach: They are cutting taxes on the rich—significantly.
.. Nearly 50 percent of the benefits of the Senate tax cut would go to the top 5 percent of household earners in the first year of the law, according to the Tax Policy Center. By 2027, 98 percent of multimillionaires would still get a tax cut, compared to just 27 percent of households making less than $75,000.
.. Republican politicians, whose campaigns are often financed by wealthy conservative donors like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch family, are worried that a failure to cut taxes on corporations will have a detrimental effect on contributions from the party’s corporate-libertarian wing. “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again,'” Representative Chris Collins
.. The “financial contributions will stop” if the GOP fails to deliver corporate tax cuts, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, told NBC News. “The donor class … has concluded that the inaction of this administration and Congress is totally unacceptable,” Josh Holmes, the former chief of staff to Senator Mitch McConnell, told CNN.
.. David Frum wrote this week, “the broad outline of tax reform seems obvious: Lower corporate rates to somewhere between 25 and 30 percent, the developed-world norm [and] tighten collection so that the rate is actually paid.”
.. that very idea has already been proposed by President Barack Obama in 2012.
Republicans immediately rejected it, just as they rebuffed the president’s inclusion of ideas hatched at the conservative Heritage Foundation in the Affordable Care Act.