The GOP tax plan is a thousand-plus-page dog's breakfast of last-minute additions, giveaways, and complexity larded upon complexity, making it nearly impossible to parse out (so much for simplifying the tax code!), but the nonpartisan, Brookings-backed Tax Policy Center's new analysis goes a long way to untangling this ugly mess.
The bill has been transformed in its reconciliation stage: earlier drafts gave huge returns to the rich, but the final goes even further: 83% of the benefits of this plan will go to the richest 1% of Americans. To pay for it, the GOP will cut Medicare, Social Security, education, healthcare, and basic assistance like food stamps.
By 2027, more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — would pay more in taxes under the tax bill agreed to by House and Senate Republicans, a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center finds. That year, 82.8 percent of the bill’s benefit would go to the top 1 percent, up from 62.1 under the Senate bill.And even in the first years of the bill's implementation, when it’s an across-the-board tax cut, the benefits of the law would be heavily concentrated among the upper-middle and upper-class Americans, with nearly two-thirds of the benefit going to the richest fifth of Americans in 2018.
Distributional Analysis of the Conference Agreement for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act [Tax Policy Center]
The Republican tax bill got worse: now the top 1% gets 83% of the gains
[Dylan Matthews/Vox]
