According to a recent poll by Quinnipiac, the majority of Americans aren't buying the Republicans' attempt to sell their trickle-down snake oil tax cut plan, so Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration have been out in force this week doing what we've come to expect from them when they're about to pass extremely unpopular legislation that harms the majority of their constituents -- lying about it on the cable news shows.
Here's more on that from The Washington Post: Senate tax bill would cut taxes of wealthy and increase taxes on families earning less than $75,000 by 2027:
The tax bill Senate Republicans are championing would give large tax cuts to the rich while raising taxes on American families earning $10,000 to $75,000 over the next decade, according to a report released Thursday by the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official nonpartisan analysts.
President Trump and Republican lawmakers have been heralding their bill as a win for hard-working Americans, but the JCT report casts doubt on that claim. Tax increases for households earning $10,000 to $30,000 would start in 2021 and grow sharply from there, JCT found. By 2027, most Americans earning $75,000 a year or less would be forced to pay more in taxes, while people earning more than $100,000 a year would continue to pay less. The report generated intense debate on Capitol Hill.
Most of the hit to poor and working-class Americans would come from the Senate Republicans’ push to insert a major health care change into the tax bill. Republicans are repealing the requirement that all Americans buy health insurance or face a penalty, a move that would lead to 13 million more uninsured Americans, the Congressional Budget Office has said. Many of those people earn modest incomes and currently receive tax credits and subsidies from the government to help them afford insurance. If the Senate GOP bill becomes law, premiums are expected to rise and millions would likely opt not to buy insurance anymore, meaning their tax breaks would go away, explained Thomas Barthold, head of the JCT.
Here's how Mulvaney tried to spin that on this Sunday's State of the Union on CNN: White House officials just called losing your health insurance a tax break:
Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday that the president “is not going to sign a bill that raises taxes on the middle class, period.” Unfortunately for Mulvaney, both the House and Senate tax bills would do just that, but he’s now trying to spin millions of people losing their health insurance as them getting a tax break.
While both plans vary as to what deductions are maintained or repealed and the timing of when certain tax breaks will be implemented, at the center of both plans is a giant tax cut for corporations. Reducing the corporate tax rate from 30 percent to 25 percent is expensive, costing an upwards of $1.5 trillion dollars over the next decade.
The Senate’s solution to pay for it includes the repeal of the individual mandate, a measure in the Affordable Care Act that requires individuals to be covered by health insurance. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this would result in both middle class tax hikes and 13 million more uninsured Americans over the next ten years.
Mick Mulvaney, however, said Sunday there is a “benefit if the repeal goes away” because it is a tax on middle class families. Marc Short, the White House Director of Legislative Affairs made the same argument on ABC’s This Week Sunday morning. Short says the mandate harms middle-income families most and applauds the Senate’s decision to include it in their tax bill.
