Sky Island Scriber: Why the GOP tax plan should be sh!tcanned.
Billmoyers.com has an excellent post by Robert Reich on Patriotism, Taxes and Trump Reich asserts that The wealthy have a duty to this country to take on a fair share of the burden to keep it going. It’s Trump and congressional Republicans’ duty to make them.
Reich includes some perhaps familiar but nevertheless stunning statistics on the upwards move of more wealth to the already obscenely wealthy. Following are snippets slightly rearranged.
Trickle-up for the rich
… the tax plan gives American corporations a $2 trillion tax break, at a time when they’re enjoying record profits and stashing unprecedented amounts of cash in offshore tax shelters.
Forty years ago, the estate tax was paid by 139,000 estates, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. By 2000, it was paid by 52,000. This year it will be paid by just 5,500 estates. Under the House tax plan, it will be eliminated altogether.
Amazing. That is an almost perfect linear relationship showing the decline in number of estates paying the estate tax. That straight line function predicts that congress will eliminate the estate tax sometime this year. Stay tuned.
Republicans obey the hypocritical oath
First of all, do some harm … to the middle class.
Multiply these examples across the economy and you get a huge hidden upward redistribution from the paychecks of average working people and the poor to top executives and investors.
A slew of analyses, including Congress’ own Joint Committee on Taxation, show that the GOP plan will raise taxes on many middle-class families.
It will also require cuts in government programs that middle- and lower-income Americans depend on, such as Medicare and Medicaid.
And the plan will almost certainly explode the national debt, eventually causing many middle-class and poor families to pay higher interest on their auto loans, mortgages and credit cards.
Dancin’ with them that brung ya
The reason Republicans give for enacting the plan is “supply-side” trickle-down nonsense. The real reason is payback to the GOP’s megadonors.