Hey, guess what. Donald Trump's proposed tax plan, such as it is, is just the usual tax giveaway to ultra-rich bastards who already have all the money and don't need more money but whatever, maybe they'll all buy Moon Yachts or something and we'll get a privatized space program out of it. Or, ya know, not:
Even accounting for his proposal to restrict most itemized deductions, the top 1 percent would still receive annual tax cuts averaging at least $250,000 per household. But the tax cuts at the very top would be far larger. The 400 highest-income taxpayers — whose incomes average more than $300 million a year — would get average tax cuts of at least $15 million a year each, we estimate from IRS data. Their annual tax cuts would be more than five times the typical college graduate’s lifetime earnings.
It works out to a $6 billion tax cut for the 400 richest families in the country, a redistribution of wealth that would be truly communist and evil and make puppies cry if it were, you know, pointed in the other direction. It never is, though; Republicans are truly devoted to the redistribution of wealth so long as the wealth goes to the people writing the campaign checks and not to, say, school lunch programs or immunization drives. Screw that, America needs another 400 private mega yachts.
This estimate likely significantly understates the tax cuts for the top 400 because it covers only two provisions that represent about one-third of the Trump tax plan’s overall cost. The estimate omits various costly, top-tilted proposals that would benefit the top 400, including cutting the corporate tax rate by more than half (from 35 to 15 percent), cutting the top rate on wages and salaries by nearly five percentage points (from 39.6 to 35 percent), and repealing the estate tax on inherited wealth (which only affects the wealthiest 2 out of every 1,000 estates).[8] These further tax cuts would likely dwarf any effects from the few offsets the plan identifies, including eliminating the deduction for state and local taxes.
This is the same trickle-down nonsense that Ronald Reagan's Republicans used in their war against New Deal programs and which has remained party mantra ever since; cut taxes on the rich to historic lows, cut government programs by whatever percent is needed to do that, ignore military costs and the deficit and proclaim that by gum, good things are sure to happen this time around. For actual results, see all Republican budgets and deficits since Reagan; for a case study, see Kansas, circa look out your damn window.
Given that it's transparently obvious at this point that "Donald Trump," the person, is a barely literate moron, it's no surprise that the plan handed to him looks like every other Republican fever-dream plan peddled in the last forty years. It didn't work before. It's not working now. Doing it twice as much will only make the problems twice as bad.
I realize the Republican base is all for this nonsense, millions upon millions of them willing to screw themselves and pay higher taxes now just on the billion-to-one change that one day they, too, will be ultra-rich bastards looking to buy their own mega yachts, but at some point there needs to be a comeuppance for this brazen effort to decouple the people who finance our candidates from the rest of the responsibilities of democracy. Also, I blame Fox News. That network has stupidized an entire generation of conservatives.