Trump’s promise on tax bill taking a U-turn
WASHINGTON — The GOP tax plan on the cusp of becoming law diverges wildly from the promises President Donald Trump and top advisers said they would deliver for the middle class — an evolution that shows how traditional Republican orthodoxy swamped Trump’s distinctive brand of economic populism as it moved through Washington.
The bill was supposed to deliver benefits predominantly to average working families, not corporations, with a 35 percent tax cut Trump proposed on the campaign trail as part of the “Middle Class Tax Relief and Simplification Act.”
“The largest tax reductions are for the middle class, who have been forgotten,” Trump said in Gettysburg, Pa., on Oct. 22, 2016.
But the final product is looking much different, the result of a partisan policymaking process that largely took place behind closed doors, faced intense pressure from corporate lobbyists and ultimately fell in line with GOP wish lists.
As top lawmakers from the House and the Senate now rush to complete negotiations to push the tax plan into law, it amounts to a massive corporate tax cut, with uneven — and temporary — benefits for the middle class that could end up increasing taxes for many working families in future years.
All told, the plan would cut taxes for businesses by $1 trillion, would cut an additional $100 billion in changes to the estate tax for the wealthy, and spreads the remaining $300 billion over 10 years among all households at every income level.
White House officials defend the tax bill emerging from the House and Senate negotiations, saying it follows through on Trump’s long-held promise of benefits for the middle class through a combination of exempting more income from taxation, expanding a tax credit benefiting families and cutting business taxes in a way that will flow through to workers in the form of higher wages.
“The middle class gets a tremendous benefit,” Trump said Wednesday.
Yet a review of more than 40 public statements that stretch back to the 2016 campaign and interviews with key officials in the White House and Congress shows how Trump and his top advisers have continuously prioritized corporate cuts — even though they have promised that middle-class cuts would be their focus.
Over several months, tax cuts for families were either stymied or scaled back. Corporate benefits only grew, a development that increasingly made some Republicans nervous as they saw the bill’s true impact.
“Fundamentally, the bill has been mislabeled. From a truth-inadvertising standpoint, it would have been a lot simpler if we just acknowledged reality on this bill, which is it’s fundamentally a corporate tax reduction and restructuring bill, period,” said Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C. “I think they were particularly concerned about innuendo and what that might mean, so it was labeled as a middle-class tax cut.”
After Trump was sworn in, his top aides immediately began discussions with House and Senate leaders on how to combine his campaign promises with longheld GOP views that cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations ultimately benefit workers.