Republicans are spending this week creating the party platform, which contains positions on transgender bathrooms (again’ em), porn (a “public health crisis”), prairie chickens (again’ em), national parks (again’ em), feeding poor kids (again’ it) and coal (super clean and good). But even as Republicans lay out their wishlist for a less-green, more-mean America, Donald Trump produces daily statements promising policies that even Republicans find … odd.
To the casual observer, Trump’s all over the map, then over it again within the same sentence, set of ever-shifting positions might seem to conflict with the obsessively detailed positions Republicans are so eager to claim. But the truth is, everything being laid out in Cleveland is just decoration. There’s only one policy that matters to Republicans, and even if that plan varies in the details, Trump follows the One Commandment.
Despite their conceptual differences, however, there is a crucial feature that Mr. Trump’s plan and the House Republicans’ plan share: The biggest tax cuts are reserved for the wealthiest.
“Relative to the current system, the plans are pulling in the same general direction, reducing taxation on capital gains and high-income households,” said William Gale, a co-director of the Tax Policy Center and a former economic adviser to President George H. W. Bush.
Top tax rates? Big cut. Estate tax? Gone. Surtax on investment income? Eliminated.
And while Trump may weasel word around the idea of eliminating tax loopholes, the Alternative Minimum Tax—which exists to keep the wealthy from using those loopholes—also goes away in both Trump’s plan and the House Republicans’ plan.
… a progressive income tax based on the ability to pay is the most practical way to ensure that the wealthy contribute their fair share to financing the government, particularly when wealth inequality has widened to the greatest levels since the Gilded Age.
No matter the details, Republicans are focused on shifting more of the tax burden to the poor and protecting the wealthy. That’s the only rule that really counts.