Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was a windfall for corporations and the ultra-wealthy. At a town meeting in 2024, my district’s representative, Josh Brecheen, said taxes for corporations were 36% —a top rate that should not be raised— but that was wrong. Seven years ago, in 2017, the TCJA cut the corporate rate to 21%.
Trump promised that reducing taxes to 21% meant corporations could raise wages, expand factories, increase production, and hire more workers. No reliable sources indicate that any of these happened to any significant extent.
What is well-documented, however, is that corporations paid higher dividends to stockholders and heavily invested in stock buybacks that jacked up bonuses for company executives. Further, corporations did not even need the tax cut. They were sitting on $2.3 trillion in cash reserves at the time (https://www.thebalancemoney. com/cost-of-trumptax- cuts-4586645.)
Now Trump proposes to lower the corporate tax rate to 20% or to 15% for American manufacturers (https://itep.org/a-distributionalanalysis- of-donald-trumps-taxplan- 2024/.)
Corporate tax cuts drain revenue from the Treasury and effectively transfers the cost of governmental services to individual taxpayers. The only alternative is to increase our already outrageous amount of debt.
What about the typical working family? Individual tax cuts are set to expire at the end of this year. Under TCJA, the tax cut for those in the lowest tax brackets was .5% but for the highest tax brackets was 2.2%. However, Trump’s newly proposed tax bill will favor ONLY the rich.
The richest one percent would receive an average tax cut of about $36,300 and the next richest 4 percent would receive an average tax cut of about $7,200. All other groups would see a tax increase with the hike for the middle 20 percent at about $1,500 and the increase for the lowestincome 20 percent of Americans at about $800 (https://itep.org/a-distributional- analysis-of-donald-trumpstax- plan-2024.)
In summary, Trump’s individual tax proposals would lead to a tax cut for the richest 5 percent of Americans and a tax increase for all other income groups.
Losing this much tax revenue from the wealthiest, if history repeats itself, will result in cuts to social programs that help the poorest.
Indeed, the newest Republican budget proposal, released February 12, 2025, calls for $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid and $230 in cuts to food stamps over a 10-year period.
The cost to the Treasury of proposed tax bills this time around is estimated to be $4.5 trillion. In his first four-year term, Trump incurred debt on our “behalf” of $8.4 trillion— that is trillion with a T—and here we go again. So much for the fiscally conservative policies of the GOP.
If, like most of us, you are not a billionaire but part of a struggling working family, your life is about to become even more difficult. If you needed more proof, this should convince you that Trump would not pull one hair from his golden head to help the working class.