While many of Donald Trump’s lies have already been exposed, the truth continues to come out and reflect poorly on the Republican Party. As if Trump’s failing presidency wasn’t a big enough threat to the GOP in the 2020 election, the tax cut reform the president championed is now being exposed and backfiring tremendously.
The GOP pushed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act through Congress at the end of 2017, which has now been exposed as being a major gift to the wealthy and corporations instead of the Americans Trump promised to benefit.
In an article for Vox, Matt Yglesias explains that Americans are starting to realize that the tax reform’s purpose was never to lower taxes for them, and it’s surfacing that the Trump administration tried to mess with the IRS’s withholding guidelines to make is seem as though Americans were getting more tax relief than they really were. Yglesias wrote:
If this was intended to give Republicans a boost in the midterms it obviously didn’t work, in part because the once-a-year tax filing process is a lot more salient than the biweekly process of automatic withholding. In fact, they are now facing a backlash from an angry public that includes millions of people who were expecting tax refunds that they are now not going to get.”
Brad Setser, a former deputy assistant secretary in the Treasury Department, backed this up and stated that while American workers were not benefiting from the tax reform, corporations were laughing all the way to the bank. Setser explained that while the reform was promoted as an incentive to keep operations in America, it has had the opposite effect. Setser said:
The White House argued they wanted a system that “encourages companies to stay in America, grow in America, spend in America, and hire in America.” Yet the bill [Trump] signed into law includes a sweetheart deal that allows companies that shift their profits abroad to pay tax at a rate well below the already-reduced corporate income tax — an incentive shift that completely contradicts his stated goal.
Why would any multinational corporation pay America’s 21 percent tax rate when it could pay the new “global minimum” rate of 10.5 percent on profits shifted to tax havens, particularly when there are few restrictions on how money can be moved around a company and its foreign subsidiaries?
And then, he dropped this harsh truth bomb:
Overall, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act amounted to a technocratic sleight of hand — a scheme set to shift an even greater share of the federal tax burden onto the shoulders of American families.”
Once again, Trump and the GOP’s lies have been exposed.
Featured image via screen capture
