Casey rips tax cut plan as Trump pitches it in Harrisburg
PHILADELPHIA » Through the intermittent travel announcements at 30th Street Station Wednesday that forced U.S. Sen. Bob Casey to pause mid-sentence, his message rang loud and clear: The GOP tax plan is bad for the middle class.
“Eighty percent of the Trump/GOP tax framework goes to the top 1 percent. How does that make sense? How in God’s name can they say that this proposal has anything to do with giving the middle class a break?” said Casey, D-Pa., from a podium at the eastern end of Philly’s largest transit hub.
Most damaging, Casey said, would be the removal of personal exemptions that despite doubling the standard deduction could mean households are still paying more.
“A family of four would gain $11,300 in standard deduction, and simultaneously lose $16,200 in personal exemptions,” Casey wrote in an open letter to President Trump.
Eliminating the personal exemption and itemized deductions, while reducing the number of tax brackets from seven to three — Casey said the net effect is to the disadvantage to many middle class families.
Quoting numbers from the Tax Policy Center, Casey claimed the proposal would grant the top 1 percent a tax cut of $146,470. Simultaneously, programs like Community Development Block Grants, the Low-Income Housing Energy Assistance Program, CHIP, WIC, as well as Medicare and Medicaid could see cuts.
“Medicare would be cut by over $470 billion over 10 years, and Medicaid would be cut by $1 trillion. Yes — that’s with a ‘t,’” Casey said. “Guess why? So they can give a trillion and a half to the super rich, the biggest corporations and anyone in our society that has great power.
“They still believe in trickle down even though it’s never worked.”
Members of the Philadelphia Unemployment Program were in attendance Wednesday. It’s a group that advocates for unemployed and low-income families to increase minimum wage and pushes for a variety of social and health benefits.
Craig Robbins of Philadelphia said the cuts to the WIC, SNAP and housing-assistance programs could be disastrous to members of PUP.
“If I was born yesterday this proposal might make sense,” Robbins said. “We’ve heard the same trickle down argument before and it’s failed and been debunked.”
Trump was expected Wednesday evening to rally a crowd of 1,000 in Harrisburg to push the tax plan, which will include cutting corporate taxes from 35 percent to 20 percent.
U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said during a visit with the Delaware County Chamber of Commerce in late September that multinational corporations are losing more than $2 trillion in profits from overseas subsidiaries that isn’t being reinvest into the United States.
Casey agreed Wednesday that corporate tax reform should indeed be discussed, but in a bipartisan fashion.
“We’re going to lose hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of ten years by lowering the corporate rate,” Casey said. “It’s a big revenue loss. I understand the objective ... (corporations) are at a disadvantage (because of the effective tax rate) to firms in other countries.”
Like his GOP counterparts, Casey said that corporate taxes is something that needs reform in the United States, but the methods currently being utilized won’t cut it.
“We should sit down and figure out a way to reduce corporate tax rates, but not to just it down and come up with an arbitrary number and expect the rest of us to come up with the revenue ... we need bipartisan hearings,” Casey said. “We could discover bipartisan ways to reduce the corporate rate and figure out a way to make it sensible so it doesn’t blow a hole in the federal budget over the next decade.”