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The road to tax reform will be long and winding with many bumps and turns along the way. But, where you start the journey matters and can reveal a great deal about priorities. The framework released by the White House and Congressional Republicans delivers major benefits to large corporations and wealthy individuals – at the expense of virtually everyone else. Rural Americans are barely an afterthought.
President Trump and Congressional Republicans’ tax proposal threatens to take the state and local tax deduction (SALT) away from over 40 million households. State and local deductions are not a partisan issue – both red and blue state families use them to save hard-earned money on their federal tax returns. The SALT deduction ensures Americans are not taxed twice on the same income.
The child tax credit (CTC) is a crucial component of our nation’s commitment to ensure that all children grow up in financially secure households. The CTC provides both broad support for children and helps lift families out of poverty. Last week, Republicans released a tax plan they claim strengthens the CTC, but it falls woefully short of the meaningful reform working families need.
Congressional Republicans want to cut the corporate tax rate to 20 percent, but corporations have already been taking home more of their rising profits tax free. Corporate profits increased by more than 40 percent from 1979 to 2015, relative to GDP, while corporate tax revenue has fallen by more than 30 percent over the same period. Big corporations can lower their corporate taxes using a menu of hard-lobbied deductions and credits and by using accounting tricks to shift their profits to low- or no-tax countries. More than half of U.S. companies’ foreign profits are reported in just seven tax havens.
Despite insisting that tax reform would focus on working families and small business tax relief, yesterday President Trump and Congressional Republicans released a tax plan that slashes taxes for “pass-through” income earned by the wealthiest Americans. Pass-through income is business income filed through an individual tax return. Cutting taxes for well-paid pass-through owners would do little to support Main Street entrepreneurship and would only force working Americans to shoulder more of the tax burden. Republicans should work with Democrats to craft a tax plan that helps small businesses grow in every corner of the nation, rather than finding backdoors to give sweetheart tax deals to Trump and big businesses that game the system.
Republicans’ latest effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is their worst yet. Graham-Cassidy is even more devastating than the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act (ORRA), which fully repealed the ACA, because it also imposes draconian cuts on the long-standing Medicaid program.
All states lose under Graham-Cassidy, the latest Republican attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The new TrumpCare bill replaces Medicaid expansion with an inadequate block grant and imposes drastic cuts on traditional Medicaid through arbitrary caps. And by eliminating Medicaid expansion, the bill denies states that have not expanded Medicaid the option of expanding after 2020.
Republicans’ latest Trumpcare bill advanced by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) may change rapidly in last-ditch efforts to buy votes before the Friday deadline, but the heart of the matter is clear: Graham-Cassidy would devastate America’s health care system by removing protections for pre-existing conditions, reinstating lifetime limits, gutting federal spending on health care, and kicking the biggest consequences down the road to 2027.
Republicans’ latest effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is their worst yet. Graham-Cassidy is even more devastating than the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act (ORRA), which fully repealed the ACA, because it also imposes draconian cuts on the long-standing Medicaid program.