If Republicans think the American people are going to like their tax plan, they should think again.
In an effort to pass President Donald Trump’s tax plan, House and Senate Republicans agreed to a single version of the bill this week so they can vote on it by December 18 – before Alabama Senator-elect Doug Jones can take his seat.
And the new bill is worse than versions passed by the House and Senate.
The repeal of the Obamacare individual mandate is still in it, which puts tens of millions of Americans are at risk of losing their healthcare.
Vox explains that by 2027:
“…Most Americans will be worse off due to higher taxes and lower health care coverage, while rich people who own shares in corporations will continue to benefit.”
On top of that, the wealthy and corporations are getting a massive gift that only got better when Senate and House Republicans got together.
“It sets a top individual income tax rate of 37 percent, below 38.5 percent in the Senate bill and 39.6 percent in the House bill (which is also the rate under current law). It finances that with a slightly higher corporate tax rate of 21 percent. It retains a more generous deduction for state and local taxes, and limits the mortgage interest deduction slightly for wealthy homeowners. The bill also eliminates the corporate alternative minimum tax, which added to the Senate bill and would’ve amounted to a $250 billion corporate tax hike.”
It should be pointed out that the corporate tax rate in America currently stands at 35 percent, and many corporations don’t even pay that much because of loopholes. Now they can pay even less, and you can bet it won’t be 20 percent since most of those loopholes still exist.
And you can forget about the extra money “trickling down” so American workers will earn better wages.
GOP strategist Steve Schmidt explained on MSNBC on Thursday that it’s not going to happen. Schmidt said:
“Generally speaking, when you are heading into an election, the things you pass, you want them to be popular.”
He also noted that polls show only around 20 percent of Americans support the bill.
“If you look at the battleground for control of the Congress, there are Republican seats in the state of New York, Republican seats in the state of California. This is going to make it more difficult for Republicans to hold those seats because, in those states, this is a tax increase, not a tax cut.”
In fact, it’s a tax increase on just about every American who isn’t a member of the top 1 percent.
And as has happened before in this country, corporations and the wealthy are not going to use their extra wealth to pay their workers more. They are going to laugh all the way to their Swiss bank account with it.
Schmidt continued:
“The fundamental economic problem is a lack of real wage growth for middle-income workers. It’s such a problem that it’s destabilizing our politics because it’s a problem that’s been building for a generation. This does nothing to deal with that. It doesn’t drive growth for that part of the population. And anybody who thinks that this corporate tax cut is going to trickle down to lift wages has a staggering ignorance of how public companies function.”
Here’s the video via YouTube.
This bill is fantastic for the wealthy and corporations, but it’s terrible for the majority of Americans, most of whom are already struggling to get by. This bill will add $1.4 TRILLION to the deficit, and what’s worse is that Republicans plan to use that deficit they are creating as an excuse to cut Social Security and Medicare, which will hurt Americans even more.
So, just when you thought Republicans could not be any crueler, they prove that they can.
Featured Image Via YouTube.
