Tax plan even a Democrat could love
Still, progressives stand united against GOP effort
“Trump’s tax plan is simple. The rich get richer, and everyone else gets left behind. It is just plain immoral.” — U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on the Tax Cuts And Jobs Act of 2017
OK, Sen. Warren, which do you hate most: The “tax cuts” or the “jobs”?
Liberals must have a problem with at least one of them because, as of this writing, not a single Democrat has announced support for the biggest tax reform since 1986 — when such notorious right-wingers as Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Ed Markey and the entire Massachusetts delegation voted in favor of “tax cuts for the rich.”
That’s not the Democratic Party of today, where alleged progressives such as Warren and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders take to the op-ed page of The New York Times to rail against a Republican Party that, they wrote yesterday, “wants to ram through an enormous tax giveaway to the wealthy before seating Doug Jones, Alabama’s newly elected Democratic senator.”
That’s a backhanded reference to the Democrats’ argument that Republicans should wait to pass tax cuts the same way Democrats waited to pass Obamacare until after Scott Brown could be sworn in. Only they didn’t. As the Boston Globe-Democrat reported in 2012:
“U.S. Senator Scott Brown was elected in 2010 with a promise to be the 41st vote against President Obama’s health care overhaul. Democrats in the Senate found a way to deny the Republican senator that opportunity, using parliamentary maneuvers to push the bill through without him.”
It’s a long story, but essentially the Democrats changed the Obamacare bill WARREN: Putting party over Democratic priorities. and the voting schedule to avoid any votes where Scott Brown could have been the 41st “no” vote. The Republicans, on the other hand, aren’t changing anything. The plan from the beginning was “a giant tax cut for Christmas,” as President Trump likes to put it. But all that’s just political yada yada. The real news is a tax plan that: • cuts tax rates for lowto middle-income families; • doubles their standard deduction; • increases the child tax credit to $2,000. This plan has zero support among modern Democrats. Wow. This is definitely not FDR’s Democratic party. It’s Ebenezer Scrooge’s. “But ... but ... but ... THE RICH!” Warren’s warriors cry. And yes, it’s true that when it comes to raw dollars, top income earners will get back more of their own money.
(Note: That’s what Liz means by a tax “giveway” to the rich. She thinks all the money belongs to the government, so if you keep any, it’s a “giveaway.”)
The reason is simple: Poor people don’t pay federal income taxes. The bottom 50 percent of income-earners pay less than 3 percent of the total federal income tax bill. Meanwhile the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of the bill ... by themselves.
This math makes the anticipated $2,059 tax cut for a typical family of four earning $73,000 even more amazing. The reduction is achieved in part by shifting money paid in by the top earners over to people who paid little or no taxes in the first place. This is also known as “income redistribution” (something Democrats used to love) and it’s supposed to fight “income inequality” (something the left whines about all the time, but actually got worse during the Obama years).
And speaking of Obama, economist Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out on my podcast yesterday that “President Obama wanted to cut corporate tax rates. Liberal economists who worked for him wanted to cut them.” They proposed a 29 percent rate, higher than the 21 percent in the GOP plan — but the principle is the same because, as Pethokoukis points out, “the issue of whether workers will see higher wages is really beyond debate. Liberal and conservative economists agree they will, the debate is over ‘how much.’ ”
Lower taxes and higher wages for workers, more investments in America that create more jobs. This is what liberals want to stand united against?
Both political history and the latest polls indicate that 2018 will be a Republican bloodbath, with massive losses in Congress and across the country. But Republicans will always have this one ray of hope:
They get to run against the Democrats.