Bill Barclay
The Trump/GOP “Unified Framework” tax plan has
something for everyone – if by everyone you mean the wealthy, corporate and
non-corporate businesses and the alt-right.
The plan embodies both the neoliberal class warfare that believes poor
people have too much money and rich people have too little money and connects
with the social conservative politics that the Trump and the GOP draws upon to
mobilize its supporters.
Class Warfare: I
Some of the class warfare politics of the Trump/GOP
proposals are obvious; others less so.
The proposal provides a small
tax cut for households in the bottom three quintiles,
ranging from about 0.5 – 1.2% of after tax income in all cases well under the
$1,182/family income boost claimed by Rep. Paul Ryan. At the upper end of the income pyramid, the
story is much different. Over half of the
total tax cuts for individuals will accrue to the top 1% of households,
boosting their after tax incomes by 8.5%. Of course, life can be even better: the
top 0.1% households would grab an average tax cut of almost $750,000, capturing
over 30% of the total tax cuts for families and individuals.
And
Trump has not neglected people like himself.
He – and others in his income and wealth sphere – will gain in three
ways from the changes in the individual income tax. First, the elimination of the alternative
minimum tax (AMT): in 2005, Trump paid $38.4 million on income over $150
million – but without the AMT he would have paid only $7.1
million.
