Trump's tax plans

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It's even worse



And they can't stop lying..

At his confirmation hearing, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin made an unambiguous promise that there would be “no absolute tax cut for the upper class” in the Trump administration’s vision of tax reform.

• Trump promised on September 13 that rich people wouldn’t benefit “at all” from his tax plan.
  
• On July 26, he went further and suggested he wanted to raise taxes on the rich.
  
• Back in May of 2016 as a candidate, he went on Meet the Press and backed tax increases on the rich. “For the wealthy, I think, frankly, it’s going to go up,” he said. “And you know what? It really should go up.”
  

If the GOP tax plan is so good, why do they lie so much about it? - Vox

There are lots more lies uncovered in the article..

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And it is not even all:

Released by the Congressional Budget Office late on Friday, it’s a new finding that further exacerbates the Republican plan’s tendency to reward wealthier Americans at the expense of the rest. This shift in federal spending stems from the Senate’s decision to add the repeal of the individual mandate, the health care law’s requirement that Americans have insurance or pay a penalty to their bill. The CBO already reported the mandate’s repeal would lead to 13 million fewer Americans having insurance and a $338 billion total federal spending cut by 2027, compared to current law.

But that drop in Americans with insurance would have residual effects on federal spending outside of reduced spending on Obamacare’s tax subsidies, which people can use to buy private coverage on the law’s marketplaces. The CBO calculated those other aftereffects — excluding the cut to tax subsidies, which are available to people making 400 percent of poverty, about $48,000 for an individual — in its new report.
As this table makes clear, the net result is less federal spending for lower-income Americans and more spending for higher-income Americans:
Congressional Budget Office

The CBO estimated that Medicaid spending in 2021 would be cut by $18 billion, versus current law; millions fewer Americans are projected to be enrolled in the program without the mandate. There would also be reductions in federal payments for cost-sharing reductions, which compensate insurers for required discounts that they must provide to lower-income customers, and another Obamacare fund that allows states to set up their own insurance programs for poorer residents.

The CBO found another way the Senate tax bill benefits higher-income Americans over the rest - Vox

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The Republican tax plan contains several small carve outs for specific industries — from craft-beer tax breaks to changes on how people can sell stocks. One of those exemptions in the Senate version of the bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), would give a break to owners of private jets. Currently, the federal government imposes an excise tax on the use of private planes for every flight an aircraft makes. Under the Republican tax legislation, costs for maintenance and other support activities for the planes would be exempt from the excise tax.

Tax reform: Trump, Republican plan gives break to private jet, planes - Business Insider

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Back in power, the new “populist” GOP is pushing the exact same economic strategy. This time, instead of aiming to slash dividend and capital gains taxes that are levied on people who own shares of stock in big companies, they are directly slashing the corporate income tax paid by those companies. But the effect — by design — is exactly the same.

The idea is that by making it more profitable to own American companies, you will juice business investment in the United States. The reality is that if we do the exact same thing we did when George W. Bush was president, we will likely get the exact same results — an inegalitarian growth pattern, an uncompetitive currency that hurts American manufacturing, and an economy based on rich people lending money to middle-class people so they can buy houses.

The theory behind Trump’s tax cuts is exactly what gave us the failed Bush economy - Vox

Not learning from Bush..

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The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business runs an ongoing survey of top economists spanning a wide number of specialties and political outlooks. The panel includes multiple Nobel Prize winners, White House veterans, and former presidents of the American Economic Association. Recently, they were asked about the Republican tax reform bills. The results weren’t encouraging. The first question was straightforward. Would they agree that if the US passed a tax bill “similar to those currently moving through the House and Senate,” GDP would be “substantially higher a decade from now”? Of the 42 economists polled, only one thought the Republican bill would boost the economy. The plurality said it wouldn’t, and the remainder were uncertain or didn’t answer.

The second question asked whether passage of the Republican tax bills would mean “the US debt-to-GDP ratio will be substantially higher a decade from now than under the status quo.” Here, too, the news was grim from Republicans. In this case, all but one economist agreed that the bills would blow up the deficit, and the outlier, Stanford's Liran Einav, turned out to have misread the question — he later clarified that he also agrees the bill would add to the debt.

Out of 42 top economists, only 1 believes the GOP tax bills would help the economy - Vox

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Kent Smetters was in the trenches in the Newt Gingrich-era Congressional Budget Office and he’s a veteran of George W. Bush’s Treasury Department. His well-regarded new analysis just concluded the Republican tax plan won’t raise nearly as much revenue as its proponents say, or provide a meaningful boost to economic growth. The problem, according to a pair of new analyses by the Penn-Wharton Budget Project, is that the Senate Republicans’ tax bill would increase federal debt by more than advertised, and increased debt accumulation would counteract much — or potentially all — of the positive growth impact of tax cuts. The result will likely be lower incomes for the bottom half of the income distribution even before considering the negative impact of inevitable spending cuts to offset the surprisingly low federal tax intake.

New dynamic score shows the Senate tax bill raises debt by more than advertised - Vox

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This is simply shocking:

It doesn’t involve an inappropriate tweet or casual racism, but Alan Rappeport’s scoop about the Trump administration lying about its own internal analysis of the Republican tax plan deserves to go down as one of the most shocking stories of 2017. And the mild-mannered headline “Ahead of Vote, Promised Treasury Analysis of Tax Bill Proves Elusive” doesn’t come close to doing it justice.

Here’s the issue. For months now, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has been saying that his team will release a “dynamic” analysis of the Republican tax plan that will reveal its growth-boosting effects to be so incredible that they put deficit worries to rest. On September 28, he even said that his in-house analysis indicated the bill would reduce the deficit by $1 trillion rather than increase it. That’s never seemed remotely plausible to me, but it’s clear that a lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill are counting on something in that neighborhood coming true to make the plan workable. Rappeport reports that Mnuchin’s just been making it up:

Mr. Mnuchin has promised that Treasury will release its analysis in full. Yet, just one day before the full Senate prepares to vote on a sweeping tax rewrite, the administration has yet to produce the type of economic analysis that it is citing as a reason to pass the tax cut. Those inside Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy, which Mr. Mnuchin has credited with running the models, say they have been largely shut out of the process and are not working on the type of detailed analysis that he has mentioned. An economist at the Office of Tax Analysis, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his job, said Treasury had not released a “dynamic” analysis showing that the tax plan would be paid for with economic growth because one did not exist.

It’s of course difficult to prove things beyond any possible doubt in a field like economics. But common sense says that if there were any kind of remotely plausible way to generate an analysis that said this tax plan would pay for itself — or even come close to paying for itself — the Republican Party would find some way to produce the actual analysis. They haven’t produced such an analysis because there’s no way to generate one that’s remotely plausible.

The big tax cut for business owners and heirs to large fortunes will, in the long run, be paid for by people who are not business owners or heirs to large fortunes. It may be paid for through the long-term middle-class tax increases that are laid out in the bill. Or it may be paid for through large cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs. Or it may be paid for through higher interest rates that raise the cost of new investment to deliver a tax windfall to old capital. But there is a big tax cut coming for people who own businesses and for people who stand to inherit fortunes worth more than $11 million. And there will be a price for that.

Trump’s Treasury Department is lying about its own analysis of the tax bill - Vox

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The mystery of the disappearing Treasury Department Tax Plan Analysis deepens..

The Treasury Department's Inspector General is investigating whether Secretary Steven Mnuchin let politics affect his promised analysis of the GOP's plan to reform the tax code. Bloomberg News reports that Inspector General Eric Thorson is looking into whether Mnuchin is refusing to release the Treasury Department's analysis of the tax plan that passed the Senate Budget Committee in a 12-11 vote on Wednesday because the agency's report contradicts claims made by both the secretary and Republicans in Congress. “It’s a top priority,” Thorson's counsel Rich Delmar told Bloomberg. The move comes after Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) accused Mnuchin in a letter to Thorson of using taxpayer funds to conduct an analysis that the government was now refusing to let see the light of day.

“Either the Treasury Department has used extensive taxpayer funds to conduct economic analyses that it refuses to release because those analyses would contradict the Treasury Secretary’s claims, or Secretary Mnuchin has grossly misled the public about the extent of the Treasury Department’s analysis,” Warren wrote in her letter.

Treasury watchdog probes lack of tax plan analysis from Mnuchin | TheHill

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Ideology versus analysis..

The latest evaluation of the Senate’s tax bill Thursday is enough to end the Republican “fantasy of magical growth” in the economy, top Finance Committee Democrat Sen. Ron Wyden (OR) said. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, the official body tasked with estimating the tax bill’s impact, reported that the Senate Republican’s tax bill would grow the economy by about 0.8 percent over 10 years, and still cost about $1 trillion. That is a wildly lower growth number than what Republicans have been promising; Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had said, “Not only will this tax plan pay for itself, but it will pay down debt.” As Republicans hurtle toward a vote on the bill, the report massively undercuts the GOP’s argument for the bill. But Senate Republicans say they just don’t believe the analysis. “I think it’s pretty clear they’re wrong,” Majority Whip Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said of the JCT score.

Republicans are rejecting the official analysis of their tax bill’s cost - Vox

There are numerous of these analysis and they're pretty consisting, as is the history, for instance with the Bush tax cuts, even if this isn't accepted by some of the characters involved:

Republicans are not happy that their tax bills will probably add more than a trillion dollars to the federal deficit. But instead of making major changes to their legislation, some are just attacking the congressional office in charge of scoring the economic impact of their tax proposals. On Friday, as Senate Republicans worked to get enough support to pass their tax bill, George W. Bush's former tax cut architect blasted the analysis of the Joint Committee on Taxation. He accused the JCT of "playing games" to thwart the bill, according to a note obtained by CNBC.

On Thursday, the JCT determined that the latest Senate version of the tax bill will add more than $1 trillion to the deficit, even factoring in potential economic growth that could result from cutting taxes. Their analysis has strained tax negotiations in the Senate, where Republicans can only lose three votes to pass their bill. Several lawmakers have expressed concerns about blowing up the deficit. Larry Lindsey, the former Bush adviser who now heads a private economic advisory firm, thinks its better blame the JCT than come up with a better bill. In a note to a client, he said JCT's analysis was "absurd," according to CNBC, and said the analysts are "part of the swamp."

"In effect, the results of the model are just what the staff decides they are since they are the ones in control of the parameters of the model," Lindsey wrote. "The staff uses the artifice of a black box model to come to whatever conclusion they want." Lindsey was an economic policy adviser to President George W. Bush and director of the National Economic Council from 2000 to 2001. He was one of the key architects of Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut plan, which ended up mostly benefiting the wealthiest 1 percent of American taxpayers. Those tax cuts didn't pay for themselves with economic growth either, despite Lindsey's claims at the time that they would. In 2002, Lindsey resigned from his role at the White House amid concerns about the sluggish US economy.

Bush's tax cut architect attacks official estimate of tax bill as a "fraud” - Vox

Just as these same bunch of characters argues that the economy would crash after Clinton raised taxes in the early 1990s. Instead, the economy boomed as it hasn't even come close since.

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Major companies including Cisco Systems Inc., Pfizer Inc. and Coca-Cola Co. say they’ll turn over most gains from proposed corporate tax cuts to their shareholders, undercutting President Donald Trump’s promise that his plan will create jobs and boost wages for the middle class. The president has held fast to his pledge even as top executives’ comments have run counter to it for months. Instead of hiring more workers or raising their pay, many companies say they’ll first increase dividends or buy back their own shares.

Trump's Tax Promises Undercut by CEO Plans to Help Investors - Bloomberg

President Donald Trump is pitching the Republican tax-cut plan as aimed primarily at helping middle-class Americans, but the biggest beneficiaries of cuts in the individual tax rates are in the wealthiest income brackets. A study from Congress’s own think tank provides some of the most recent evidence of this. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concluded that under the Senate plan, Americans making between $500,000 and $1 million a year would see the biggest percentage increases in their after-tax income. By contrast, the CRS found that taxpayers making less than $30,000 would see their after-tax income decline as soon as 2021.

New Evidence the GOP Tax Bills Tilt Toward the Wealthy - Bloomberg