Note: If you like, you can use parts of this, or the whole thing to send a letter to the editor.
Don’t be fooled. What is being rushed through Congress using special procedures to avoid public debate is not tax reform. It is a giveaway funded by borrowing. It will increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion. Most of the money goes to the wealthy. One out of three Californians will see their taxes go up because of lost deductions. It is insane to blow up the deficit to give money to the rich. Republican Congressmen like Tom McClintock and Doug La Malfa were hysterical about deficits when Obama was President. Now they want to create a huge deficit. What happened to their promise to help Mainstreet not Wall Street billionaires?
There is no “reform” in this bill. Corporations don’t pay taxes on 35% of their income. That is a fiction. Dozens of major companies pay nothing. The rest pay far less that the official rate. Look up on Google what some of the biggest corporations actually pay in income taxes. The wealthy are able to use a special rate on capital gains to pay taxes at a level far less than we pay on ordinary income. Some billionaires like President Trump pay little if any taxes. What he did pay on the one return we know about was primarily the result of the Alternative Minimum Tax requirement. He wants that repealed. Guess what? This bill repeals the AMT. It also repeals the federal estate tax. Only millionaires who die with more than $5.5 million on hand, pay anything now. With no the estate tax in the future there will be less incentive to make tax deductible gifts to charities at the time of death.
Sadly, nothing in the bill requires a single new job be created here in America or anywhere else. Like previous tax cuts, most will go to corporate buy outs and stock bonuses. New jobs, if there are any, will be created in China and other countries where wages are low and profits higher.
Cutting taxes means cutting the federal budget. With less money collected, major cuts will have to be made to Medicare, Medicaid and eventually Social Security to balance the budget in the future. The Republican plan was to cut healthcare first and use that money for tax cuts. Now the plan is to do the tax cuts first so that Medicare and Medicaid will have to be cut later. The bill should be defeated. Tell Congress know how you feel about increasing the deficit to make the rich even richer.
