Wasn’t this supposed to be for the middle class?
When Donald Trump was elected president last year, a sweeping rewrite of the tax code was one of his top priorities.
Throughout the campaign, Trump said he wanted a “middle-class tax cut,” one that wouldn’t benefit wealthy people like him and would spur huge levels of economic growth while not adding to the national debt. “For the hedge fund guys, they’re going to be paying up,” Trump promised in September 2015.
As president, Trump has continued to insist the tax code overhaul won’t be good for himself or other millionaires. “This is going to cost me a fortune, this thing ― believe me,” Trump said this week.
But the big winners in the GOP bill that the Senate passed early Saturday morning are corporations and the wealthy. Trump himself ― a self-proclaimed billionaire ― stands to gain millions through the elimination of certain taxes (though we don’t know exactly how much because Trump won’t release his tax returns). Far from being a middle-class tax cut, the measure is a massive corporate giveaway, a bill that recycles decades of Republican ideology on trickle-down economics and trusts that executives will hand over their new gains to average-income workers.
“If my friends here want to give a tax cut to the middle class,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) asked on the Senate floor Thursday, “why don’t we give a tax cut to the middle class?” His argument had no effect.
