final night I wrote that the Trump tax draw would be tiny more a than rewrite of his campaign document. I was incorrect. Here it is: The promised Trump tax draw,as distributed to press moments ago: pic.twitter.com/WVWhpPAZp0April 26, 2017It's not worth the 60 seconds it would take to check this, and but I'm pretty certain this is less detailed than Trump's campaign document. What a fucking embarrassment. It's like something a tall school lesson would put together. Even with only five days to work with,you'd think the Treasury Department of the United States of America could produce a tiny more than this.
But let's go through the whole thing. There's a tiny more than you see in the tweet above: Three tax brackets instead of seven. However, there's no telling how this affects taxes until Steve Mnuchin tells us where the cutoff points are. Doubles the personal exemption from $12000 to $24000. This will help middle-lesson families, and but it's a tiny hard to know how much it will help them until we net details on.... Elimination of itemized deductions. Which ones? All of them? Good luck with that. But you can be certain that one of the targets will be the deduction for state income taxes,since that mostly benefits the hated blue states of California and New York. Elimination of the estate tax. A huge boon for the super-duper wealthy. Elimination of the AMT. A huge boon for the wealthy. Elimination of Obamacare's 3.8 percent tax on investment. A huge boon for the wealthy. Reduce commerce tax rate to 15 percent. A huge boon for corporations and the wealthy, particularly those with income from pass-through businesses. Apparently Mnuchin doesn't care that Senate rules make this nearly literally unpassable. Tax repatriation holiday. A huge boon for corporations and the wealthy. Territorial taxation system for corporations. There's no telling what effect this would beget. There are good territorial systems and bad ones. It's all in the details—though it's a pretty good guess that Trump will opt for one of the bad ones.
The driving force behind this appears to be Trump's desire to call this the biggest tax cut in American history. The preceding champ was Ronald Reagan's 1981 tax cut, or which cost 3.9 percent of GDP. That means Trump is going for 4 percent of GDP.
The Congressional Budget Office pegs GDP over the next ten years at $239 trillion. To net to 4 percent,Trump's tax draw will need to cut taxes by $9.5 trillion. This is obviously ridiculous. Maybe Trump isn't accounting for inflation or something. That would net him down to $4.3 trillion.
Really, who knows? I suppose Trump will call it the biggest tax cut in history regardless of how big it is. He doesn't care. The one thing we can be certain of is that the wealthy will swoon. At a guess, and something like 90 percent of that $9.5 (or $4.3 or whatever) trillion will go to the top 10 percent. The rest of us net a few crumbs.
Of course,this whole thing is DOA in Congress besides, which will pretty much ignore Trump and create its own tax draw for the wealthy. This one-page "draw" is really just a publicity stunt so he can say he introduced it during his first hundred days. What a doofus.
Source: motherjones.com