By Jon Queally
Common Dreams (9/28/17)

Despite declaring the “full-on whopper” of a lie this week that his tax plan “is not good for me, believe me,” a new analysis by the New York Times published overnight shows that President Donald Trump would save himself well over a $1 billion if the proposals he laid out were to become law.

Using what it is known about Trump’s fortune—a still difficult number to determine given that he refuses to release his tax returns—the Times looked at a portion of Trump’s 2005 return leaked to the press earlier this year alongside an estimate by Bloomberg which put his net worth at approximately $2.68 billion in order to assess the degree to which he would directly benefit.

While keeping in mind that other estimates (and unsubstantiated claims by Trump himself) put his wealth higher, the analysis based on the $2.68 billion estimate found that Trump would personally enjoy:

• Savings of about $1.1 billion from repealing the estate tax
• Savings of $31 million from repealing the alternative minimum tax
• Savings of about $16 million from taxing certain types of business income at 25 percent
• Savings of about $0.5 million from cutting the highest tax rate

Meanwhile, Politifact was among those taking serious issue with the spurious claim made by the president, that the abolishment of the estate tax was a move geared to protect “millions of small business owners and the American farmer” while not mentioning that it is a policy specifically tailored to help millionaires and billionaires like himself pass their massive wealth to their heirs with zero federal tax liability.

The fact-checking site reported:

In 2017, estates worth less than $5.49 million are exempt from the tax, according to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. Above $5.49 million, the estate is generally taxed at 40 percent. However, family-owned farms and closely-held businesses may be able to pay less or pay in low-interest installments.

So how many estates are affected by the tax? Not many, and the people who pay it are usually among the country’s richest families.

Politifact concluded that Trump saying “millions” of American farmers and small business owners would benefit was “a ridiculously high estimate. Only 5,460 estates even pay the tax each year, according to a credible estimate, and of those, about 80 represented small businesses or farms. We rate the statement Pants on Fire.”

As Philip Bump wrote for the Washington Post on Tuesday, “Trump asks us to take on faith that these public provisions will somehow work to his detriment without explaining why. We’d be foolish to do so.”

(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.)

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(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2017. Open source and free to use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )

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Surprise! Non-Partisan Analysis Finds Trump Tax Plan Primarily Rewards Top 1%

By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams (9/29/17)

The Trump administration has tried everything—including outright lies and suppression of contradictory evidence—to avoid admitting that its tax plan will primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans, but a new analysis released Friday by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center (TPC) makes that fact inescapable.

“Those with the very highest incomes would receive the biggest tax cuts,” TPC’s report, the first in-depth analysis of Trump’s proposals, notes. “Taxpayers in the top one percent (incomes above $730,000), would receive about 50 percent of the total tax benefit [in 2018]; their after-tax income would increase an average of 8.5 percent.”

“By 2027, the top one percent would get 80 percent of the plan’s tax cuts.” 
—Howard Gleckman, Tax Policy Center

By comparison, the after-tax income of those in the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution would only rise by somewhere between 0.5 and 1.2 percent—hardly the “miracle” President Donald Trump has promised, and made worse by his administration’s proposed cuts to crucial safety net programs.

And as Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at TPC, notes, the disparity between benefits accrued by the rich and everyone else “would grow over time.”

“By 2027, the top one percent would get 80 percent of the plan’s tax cuts while the share for middle-income households would drop to about five percent,” Gleckman observed. “On average, taxes for the top one percent would fall by more than $200,000 or 8.7 percent of their after-tax incomes.”

Those in the top 0.1 percent would fare even better if Trump’s plan—which TPC found would reduce federal revenue by $2.4 trillion over the next decade—becomes the law of the land.

On average, the wealthiest 0.1 percent would pocket an extra million bucks in after-tax income.

The analysis also found not only that the rich would massively benefit from Trump’s proposals, but also that many middle class and low-income families would end up paying more in taxes.

By 2027, TPC’s report notes, one in four middle class families would end up with higher taxes.

“It is absolutely outrageous that Donald Trump and Paul Ryan would seek to increase taxes on middle class families while lowering them for millionaires and billionaires,” Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, concluded in a statement on Friday. “It’s doubly outrageous that while they’re doling out extra yachts and private jets to the elite, their budgets make cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and public education, further lowering the standard of living for working families. That’s no tax plan, that’s a tax scam.”

Overall, TPC’s findings thoroughly undermine Trump’s promise to “ensure that the benefits are focused on the middle class, the working men and women, not the highest-income earners,” as many immediately observed on social media.

(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.)

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• Trump Tax Plan Would Mainly Give Money To Richest 1% – Donald Trump’s “once-in-a-lifetime” plan to cut taxes for “average Americans” would mainly benefit the richest 1% and deliver only modest cuts for most US households, according to an independent analysis released on Friday. Trump announced a radical overhaul of the US tax system on Wednesday, claiming the plan would bring relief to middle-class households. But according to a study released by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, the average cut to most households would be just $1,700 by 2027 – and one in four households would actually pay more tax. Households making more than about $900,000 a year, however, would see their taxes drop by more than $200,000 on average. … Read the Rest

 

• Freeloader: Trump Advisor Kellyanne Conway Just Closed Million Dollar Deal That Allows Her To Avoid Paying Taxes – Kellyanne Conway just sold her polling company and got to keep all the funds, thanks to a conflicts of interest loophole that let her avoid costly taxes because she belongs to the executive branch. Before Conway became the first woman to run a successful presidential campaign and slid into her comfortable office in Trump’s White House, she entered politics through the polling business. Over two decades ago, Conway started Polling Company and Woman Trend, a unit within her own polling company that tracks social, cultural, financial, professional and health trends affecting women. She owned her own GOP polling firm all the way through the presidential race, until Thursday, when CRC Public Relations bought The Polling Company/Woman Trend. Terms weren’t announced, but back in March, Conway estimated the value of her stake in The Polling Company/Woman Trend at somewhere between $1 million and $5 million. … Read the Rest