This is a Very Bad Tax Plan
Some quick facts about the Republican Congress’ proposed tax plan:
- Taxes will go up for most families making $150k/year or more.
- Taxpayers making less than that will get a tiny average tax cut of about $230 (0.4%).
- The plan will increase the national debt by at least $2 trillion.
So where does the money go? That's easy:
- Households making over $1 million annually will get an average tax cut of $206,000.
- Corporations -- don't even ask; let's just say that they will be pretty happy with their shiny new tax rates, ability to repatriate overseas earnings tax-free, etc.
Oh, and a couple of other things --
- The plan will tax your 401k, reducing the maximum annual tax-free contribution by at least half.
- That cut in corporate taxes? Over a third of it will accrue to foreign investors, who hold about 35% of the equity in US corporations.
A Plan Even Republicans Won’t Like
I hate this plan. You hate this plan. But the interesting thing is that most Republicans also hate this plan, or at least do not approve of what’s in it.
- 64% of Republicans do not support tax cuts for wealthy taxpayers.
- 59% of Republicans do not support tax cuts for corporations (and imagine if they knew how much of those cuts would benefit foreign investors!)
Driving the Wedge
There's a split in the Republican party: The white-resentment wing, which provides most of the votes, does not support tax cuts for the rich. On the other side, the greed-is-good wing provides much of the GOP’s money and has spent decades dreaming about these tax cuts.
It's this partnership -- white-resentment voters fueled by big money from wealthy anti-tax donors -- that has powered the GOP since Reagan. But it's an unstable combination.
The best chance to defeat the GOP in the long term is to drive a wedge between those two sides.
This tax plan is a chance to do that. The ideal scenario? Picture Donald Trump tweeting furiously about Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and their terrible tax plan. Remember, Donald doesn't know anything about taxes. He is just the rubber stamp in the White House. His job is to spout nonsense ("cutting the inheritance tax will benefit truckers!") to convince his working-class supporters that this awful tax plan is somehow in their interest.
If the tax plan sucks -- and it does -- and people see that it sucks, and it loses -- he will lash out just the way he did on Obamacare replacement.
The Upshot
Our job is to make this tax plan toxic, and to hang it around the necks of Republicans in Congress.
So stop calling it the Trump tax plan. It's the Paul Ryan tax plan, or the Congressional tax plan. Republicans in Congress designed it, and they need to take the blame for it.
“Is your representative voting for a $700 billion giveaway to foreign investors?” That’s a pretty good line, it seems to me.
Trump is popular among exactly the kinds of Republicans who will hate this tax plan. Associating it with Trump makes those people reluctant to go against it. On the other hand, associating it with unpopular members of Congress helps drive that wedge a little deeper and, who knows? maybe gets us a little closer to blowing up this unholy partnership of greed, ignorance, and bigotry.
