Trump's tax plans

[stpioc]

You couldn't make this stuff up if you wanted to..

Both as a candidate for president and again as recently as mid-September, Donald Trump promised that his tax program wouldn’t help rich people “at all.” His Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin vowed as much in January. These pledges have always been at odds with the plain text of Republican Party tax promises. Trump rolled out three or four different tax plans over the course of the campaign, and they all involved huge tax cuts for the rich. House Republicans’ “Better Way” tax framework released last year involved huge tax cuts for the rich, and the conceptually rather different tax framework they are uniting around this fall also involved huge tax cuts for the rich. But the administration has always at least been committed to pretending that these plans didn’t involve huge tax cuts for the rich. 

Now, however, there’s a new story. They really wanted to avoid a huge tax cut for the rich but they couldn’t figure out how. “So when you’re cutting taxes across the board, it’s very hard not to give tax cuts to the wealthy with tax cuts to the middle class,” Mnuchin tells Politico’s Ben White in a new podcast. “The math, given how much you are collecting, is just hard to do.” A rather credulous Washington Post article noted that among the hurdles still facing tax reform is that Republicans “haven’t sorted out how to ensure that the majority of any tax cuts don’t benefit primarily the wealthy.”

The truth, however, is that avoiding a tax cut for the rich is really easy. The reason Republican plans cut taxes for the rich is that Republicans believe rich people are paying far too much in taxes, not because there’s some conceptual barrier to not cutting their taxes.
The GOP plan has lots of tax cuts only for the rich. Consider that the GOP’s unified tax framework contains the following provisions:

• A cut in the top tax rate that only applies to households with well over $400,000 in annual income.
  
• A tax cut for business owners that you only get if your business delivers your family more than $150,000 a year in take-home profits.
  
• A tax cut for people who inherit estates that are worth more than $5 million.
  
• A steep cut in the corporate income tax rate, whose benefits primarily flow to stock owners rather than wage earners.
  

A person who did not want to cut rich people’s taxes would, rather clearly, simply not include those provisions in the tax bill.

Republicans say they can’t figure out how to not cut taxes for the rich - Vox