Enjoy your $1,200 one-time consolation prize for losing your livelihood, your way of life, and your economic security in this pandemic. And don't think about the 43,000 millionaires and billionaires who got a $90 billion tax break for 2020 courtesy of the Republican Senate. That's right: 43,000 people making more than $1 million annually are getting 82% of the benefit from the tax change Republicans wedged into the CARES stimulus package. And thanks to Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse for uncovering it for us.
"It's a scandal for Republicans to loot American taxpayers in the midst of an economic and human tragedy," said Whitehouse, who requested the Joint Committee on Taxation analysis that enumerated the tax change. "Congress should repeal this rotten, un-American giveaway and use the revenue to help workers battling through this crisis." It is a scandal, it is un-American, and it is absolutely what Republicans are.
Mitch McConnell's Senate is an immediate danger to the people. Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats end their majority.
The 2017 tax scam law from Republicans mistakenly (according to them) included a limit on how much owners of businesses that were formed as "pass-through" entities—where the income is taxed as the owner's personal income at the individual rate rather than as business income for federal income taxes—can deduct against nonbusiness income like capital gains. This mostly helps out hedge fund investors and real estate business owners, experts at the Tax Policy Center say. (Because the hedge fund investors and real estate tycoons are the people who really need relief right now.) Republicans argue that the increased "liquidity" will help somehow. You know, trickle down.
Republicans from Trump on down are using this crisis to steal absolutely everything that's not nailed down. And throwing crumbs to the rest of us. So yeah, Whitehouse is right. This giveaway needs to be repealed and the revenue regained from it targeted to where it needs to go—the people.
