Trump Tax Plan Is for the Superrich – Like Trump
Sept. 27, 2017
Trump Tax Plan Is for the Superrich – Like Trump
Statement of Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen
Note: President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans today unveiled a tax plan, the “Unified Framework for Fixing Our Broken Tax Code.”
This is a tax plan that only the superrich and giant corporations could love. And it’s a tax plan for one superrich person in particular to love: billionaire President Donald Trump.
This plan may literally be worth billions to Trump personally:
• Repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax would have saved Trump $30 million in 2005 (the year for which partial Trump returns are available) alone.
• Lowering the tax rate on pass-through corporations could cut his tax bill by a third or more every year.
• Eliminating the estate tax could save the Trump family as much as $4 billion, if Trump is in fact worth $10 billion.
• Other features of the tax plan might give major savings to Trump, though the secretive nature of his business holdings and the fact that he refuse to release his tax returns makes this impossible to know – does, for example, Trump have profits parked offshore, waiting for a low repatriation rate?
Of course, it’s not only Trump who “wins” at the expense of regular Americans. The Trump tax plan is a massive payback to the political donor class, conferring untold riches on those who don’t need it – the superrich and giant corporations – while depriving the federal government of needed revenue and paving the way for draconian cuts in Social Security, Medicare, education and more.
The donors will undoubtedly reward those who support this plan, but voters are sure to have a radically different response.
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