@coldjoint,
ColdJoint wrote: Trump **** canned those regulations and cut taxes.
Apparently you didn't know that democrats favor lower taxes for the middle class too, even more so than republicans. Unlike republicans, democrats do favor fair taxes for corporations like Trump's and non charitable churches who currently pay nothing in taxes...
The regulations that Trump **** canned like, Trump **** canned the entire pandemic response team Obama set up? In hind sight that worked out well for the American people too? (cynical)
Mark Mazur, director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said the tax-cut picture is more nuanced, with a “mixed record” so far.
The revised tax code is “not as tilted toward billionaires as some of the rhetoric may lead you to think, but it is the case the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act favored higher-income people,” he told MarketWatch.
For example, Mazur noted the sharp drop in liabilities for households making between $250,000 and $500,000 a year. Tax-code changes made it less likely these taxpayers would be subject to the alternative minimum tax, said Mazur.
Though taxpayers making this amount would typically be taxed at the 35% rate, the alternative minimum tax applies a lower rate of between 26% and 28% but with fewer available deductions, he noted.
Mazur said the law cut taxes for a lot of households, but added that it only provided a “boost for the economy in the short run” without strong wage increases or “huge bursts in investment in the U.S. from corporations.”
Focusing on personal taxes didn’t tell the whole story, according to Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the progressive Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, or ITEP.
“The parts of the Trump tax cuts that really benefit the rich are not the personal-income-tax cuts but the corporate-income-tax cuts and estate-tax cuts,” according to Wamhoff. Rule changes surrounding corporate taxes, “which mainly benefit the (mostly rich) people who own corporate stocks, and the estate-tax cuts, are the parts of the law that made it a good deal for the rich,” Wamhoff said.
Among other noteworthy provisions, the tax cuts reduced the corporate-income-tax rate to 21% from 35%. It also raised the exemption before an estate tax kicked in, going from $5.4 million to $11.4 million.
He added: “No one ever said that low- or middle-income people would get no benefits from the Trump tax law. What ITEP and others pointed out from the beginning was that the rich would get a disproportionate share of the benefits of the law and nothing in this data conflicts with that.”
