GOP Tax Plan: The Biggest Winners and Losers
The Republican tax plan now up for debate in the House is a budget-buster, creating $1.7 trillion in new deficits over ten years. It's another mark of ideological bankruptcy from a party that, just a few years ago, shut down the government – and threatened to throw America into default – rather than raise the debt limit.
More surprising for a Republican tax plan, the proposal is not an across-the-board tax cut. In fact, tens of millions of Americans would ultimately face a tax hike, according to Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation, while fewer than half of U.S. households would pocket a yearly tax cut of more than $100. By 2027, according to the independent Tax Policy Center, "at least 25 percent of taxpayers" would pay more to the IRS. Their average tax increase: $2,080. In that year, the analysis concludes, "Taxpayers in the top 1 percent would receive nearly 50 percent of the total benefit."
The biggest beneficiaries of the GOP tax plan are corporations – the corporate tax rate plummets from 35 percent to just 20 percent. Corporations that have dodged taxes by stashing more than $2.6 trillion offshore would get an even sweeter break, paying as little as 5 percent on that wealth. In another huge break, the top rate on wealthy "pass through" businesses would drop from nearly 40 percent to just 25 percent.
The GOP tax plan does include a few unambiguously good ideas like ending the mortgage-interest deduction for vacation homes, repealing a tax break that subsidizes sports stadium construction, and (modestly) taxing the richest private college endowments. But the bill also promotes some spectacularly bad public policy.
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