Team Trump made its opening bid on tax reform this week with a parade of lies spewed by everyone from Donald Trump to his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, to his Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
Though Trump's tax "plan" hasn't actually materialized in bill form yet, the broad brush strokes of what Republicans intend to do is clear enough to render some of their biggest claims about the plan pants-on-fire fabrications.
"The wealthy are not getting a tax cut under our plan." —Gary Cohn, Good Morning America, Sept. 28, 2017
The Washington Post absolutely destroys that claim:
The Trump tax plan drops the top bracket from 39.6 to 35 percent, and allows for the possibility of a 25 percent top rate through a pass-through entity. It presumably would also eliminate a 3.8 percent Obamacare tax on investment income that hits only upper-income taxpayers.
So, on its face, this is a ridiculous statement to make for any plan that includes reductions in tax rates. That’s because federal income taxes are paid mostly by the wealthy. So when you cut income tax rates, it results in lots of dollars for the wealthiest taxpayers.
Most Americans—loosely, the 99 percenters—pay payroll taxes on programs such as Social Security but pay almost nothing in income taxes. "The top 10 percent of income earners in 2016 paid 80 percent of individual income taxes. The top 20 percent paid 94.8 percent," writes the Post.
But that doesn't even account for the plan's intent to eliminate the estate tax—a tax that affects a very small number of estates worth more than about $5.5 million. So that provision is nothing but a boon for the wealthy.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2xM07r1
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