Trump's claims about his tax plan are, like everything else he says, a lie.
By
Soon
you’re going to hear about taxes.
You’ll
see images of families flashing across your TV screen while a soothing narrator
assures you that the tax plan being debated in Washington really is good for
you.
The newspapers you read, the social media apps you scroll through, the websites you frequent, and the snippets of radio you catch will all feature ads talking about it.
The newspapers you read, the social media apps you scroll through, the websites you frequent, and the snippets of radio you catch will all feature ads talking about it.
That’s
what a marketing blitz looks like, and there’s one coming for the Trump tax
plan. It will be well-produced, well-orchestrated, and completely devoid of
facts.
President
Trump started his sales pitch for his tax cutting agenda in Missouri in August,
where the assembled audience was treated to a fact-free sermon on the virtues
of his plan. Gone were any specifics of what’s in it, or who gets what.
Looking at Trump’s tax plan from the campaign, as well as what the Republican majority in the House of Representatives have proposed, we can see the basic outlines of what’s coming.
Corporations
will see their nominal tax rates drop from 35 percent to 20 or even 15 percent.
Individual rates will go down — possibly for everyone, but definitely and most strikingly for the very wealthy. Overall tax revenue will tank, potentially by as much as $10 trillion over ten years.
Individual rates will go down — possibly for everyone, but definitely and most strikingly for the very wealthy. Overall tax revenue will tank, potentially by as much as $10 trillion over ten years.
What
does all this look like in the real world?
On
the corporate side, we know for sure that lower corporate taxes do not create
jobs.
In
the ads to come, maybe you’ll see a guy in a hard hat claim that corporate tax
cuts will put him back to work. He’s lying.
A
recent Institute for Policy Studies report looks
at 92 profitable companies that already pay an effective 20 percent tax rate,
thanks to loopholes. On average they’ve cut jobs, even as the rest of the
private sector saw a 6 percent jobs increase.
On
the individual side, half of the proposed cuts will go to millionaires,
according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Less than 5 percent go to families with household incomes below $45,000.
This
is probably the biggest wealth grab in American history by the wealthy, for the
wealthy. Selling it as a middle-class tax cut, regardless of the images in the
ads you see, is just old-fashioned lying.
And
finally there’s the revenue. Trump claims his tax cuts will pay for themselves
with increased economic growth. That theory’s been debunked many times over and yet
remains stubbornly in play.
So
what happens when trillions of dollars of tax revenue get slashed?
Congress
currently bans itself from passing bills that increase the deficit in one of
their better acronyms — Pay As You Go (PAYGO). That means the tax cuts Trump
proposes will have to come out of public programs.
No
matter how much hype you hear, you’d better believe those cuts are gonna hurt.
From food assistance like the Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) program to Head
Start, and from clean water protections to unemployment insurance — it’s all on
the line.
It’s
hard to keep an eye on the truth when savvy marketing campaigns are hell-bent
on deflecting your attention away from it. Don’t buy it. The Trump tax cut plan
is disastrous for working families and for anyone who cares about a fair and
just economy.
Josh Hoxie directs the
Project on Taxation and Opportunity at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Distributed by OtherWords.org.