Apparently, It's 'Very Hard' for GOP to Avoid Tax Cuts for the Rich

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin TODAY:"It's very hard not to give tax cuts to the wealthy."

The Trump Administration continues to break promise after promise to the American people – this time, with the Ryan-McConnell tax cuts for the rich.

Vox: Republicans say they can't figure out how to not cut taxes for the rich

Trump rolled out three or four different tax plans over the course of the campaign, and they all involved huge tax cuts for the rich. House Republicans' "Better Way" tax framework released last year involved huge tax cuts for the rich, and the conceptually rather different tax framework they are uniting around this fall also involved huge tax cuts for the rich. But the administration has always at least been committed to pretending that these plans didn't involve huge tax cuts for the rich.

Now, however, there's a new story. They really wanted to avoid a huge tax cut for the rich but they couldn't figure out how.

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The truth, however, is that avoiding a tax cut for the rich is really easy. The reason Republican plans cut taxes for the rich is that Republicans believe rich people are paying far too much in taxes, not because there's some conceptual barrier to not cutting their taxes.

New York Magazine: Republicans: We're Trying Not to Cut Taxes for the Rich, But It's Too Hard

At the beginning of the year, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin promised that the Trump administration's tax cuts would not deliver a net benefit to the rich. Since then, Republican leaders have unveiled a series of progressively more detailed frameworks that betray an unmistakable intent to do just that. And so the defense is slowly evolving into a sense of resignation.

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Apparently not giving rich people a huge tax cut is a technical problem our best minds have yet to crack.

It is not that difficult to avoid tax cuts for the richest few.  With the majority of Americans rejecting the Ryan-McConnell tax framework, the Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress must stand with hard-working families and work with Democrats on bipartisan tax reform that puts the middle class first, not more deficit-exploding tax cuts for billionaires.