Trump’s Coming Tax Plan: Shift Handouts from Poor to Rich

By Lindsay Owens

As President Trump takes office, his Republican allies in Congress are already hard at work readying his legislative agenda.

Trump campaigned on a promise to lower costs for Americans. But so far, the GOP hasn’t proposed a single plan to do that. Instead, Republicans are laser-focused on passing another round of massive tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and corporations.




It’s shaping up to be 2017 all over again.

Trump made a lot of promises on the campaign trail in 2016 too — and quickly broke most of them. But he did fulfill one: His 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, his only signature legislative accomplishment, was a field day for the oligarchs and CEOs who helped elect him.

That law delivered a tax cut for the richest 0.1 percent of Americans that was 277 times larger than the one teachers and firefighters got, nearly doubling billionaire wealth in this country and spiking inequality.

Meanwhile, corporations got a 40 percent discount on their taxes, which they used to send record stock buybacks to their wealthy shareholders and pad their profits while they overcharged consumers on everything from gas to groceries.

The bill never delivered the wage gains or economic growth Trump promised. But it did add $1.9 trillion to the deficit.

Key provisions of this tax scam expire next year. That would be welcome news for the vast majority of Americans, who are sick and tired of tax cuts for the wealthy. But Trump and his Republican colleagues are readying a supersized set of high-end tax breaks that would make his 2017 legislation look like child’s play.

Republicans plan to give the richest Americans a fresh round of individual tax breaks, slash the corporate tax rate yet again, and cut taxes on capital gains and dividends, which would let their Wall Street friends keep even more of their winnings when they sell a stock or are showered with dividends.




Then they’ll move to step two: draconian budget cuts for the programs Americans rely on.

GOP leaders will point to falling revenues from their own tax cuts as evidence for the need to cut spending on life-saving programs that families rely on, like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps more than 42 million families afford their groceries.

In fact, Trump is putting unelected and unaccountable billionaires — Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) to decide the painful cuts we’ll have to face. And surprise, surprise: They’re almost exclusively targeting programs that help working people, veterans, students, families, and other non-billionaires.

If Trump and the GOP get their way, we know exactly what to expect: income inequality will worsen, crucial government programs will be starved, and corporations and the ultra-wealthy will amass even more outsized power over our economy and democracy.

But we can learn something else from our experience in 2017. Democrats united in their opposition to Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy, pushing Trump’s approval rating to the lowest point in his presidency and ousting supporters of his corporate tax cuts in the next year’s midterms.

Tax giveaways for the wealthy and corporations were deeply unpopular with voters in 2018 — and that’s only intensified after this recent wave of corporate price gouging that has squeezed American families. Lawmakers must make it as difficult as possible to enact this next tax giveaway.

This year, we need to make sure every single member of Congress understands that supporting Trump’s tax plans means turning their backs on working Americans.

Lindsay Owens is the Executive Director of Groundwork Action.