David_42
Registered Democrat.
- Aug 9, 2015
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This is common sense.
GOP tax proposals tilt to the rich, despite populist rhetoric
GOP tax proposals tilt to the rich, despite populist rhetoric
DENVER – Jeb Bush went to Detroit and talked about leveling the playing field.
Marco Rubio wrote a book about helping the working class. Rand Paul is promising to expand the Republican Party beyond its traditional base.
Republican presidential candidate former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush Gerry Broome AP
Yet all three Republican presidential candidates have offered tax proposals that would, for reasons such as nomination politics and tax rate realities, overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest.
In doing so, they have drawn criticism from Democrats who call it proof that the GOP’s eventual nominee will mainly try to help the rich.
Even some conservatives expressed concerns after Bush released his proposed tax cut this past week.
Then there was the analysis last week from the Washington-based Tax Foundation that concluded his plan would initially help the top 1 percent of earners 10 times as much as it would those in the bottom 10 percent.
“Republicans should be countering the caricature of themselves as slavishly devoted to the interests of rich people and corporations, not playing into it,” according to an editorial in the conservative National Review. The magazine nonetheless praised Bush’s effort to reduce income and business tax rates.
The trio’s tax plans do contain elements aimed directly at middle- and working-class voters. Rubio proposes to expand the child tax credit and Bush wants to double the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is designed to help the working poor.
But experts note that any broad income tax cut inevitably will benefit the rich more than anyone else, because they pay much more in federal income taxes than the middle class or poor.
About 40 percent of the country does not pay federal income tax. The top 1 percent of earners pays about 35 percent of the income tax.
“It is a mechanical problem,” said Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the centrist Brookings Institute and left-leaning Urban Institute.
“If you start from the place where any tax plan has got to cut tax rates, you start with a plan that is already regressive and it becomes challenging and complicated to ameliorate that.”
Michael Strain of the conservative American Enterprise Institute said Republicans have good reason to push for across-the-board cuts, despite the inevitable benefit to the wealthy.
“There’s a genuine concern on the part of conservatives about economic growth and having tax code that fosters economic growth because of a belief that you need a growing economy to help everyone in the country,” Strain said.
John Cogan, a Stanford economist who served in the Reagan administration and consulted on the Bush plan, argued that the tax reductions can help cure the inequality that critics contend they exacerbate. “Economic growth is absolutely essential to reducing the degree of inequality,” Cogan said.
Read more here: GOP tax proposals tilt to the rich, despite populist rhetoric
