Ryan-McConnell Tax Plan: A GOP Fairy Tale

Republicans plan to pass a budget this week that devastates America's investments in good-paying jobs, growing wages and the bedrock promise of a secure and healthy retirement – nothing more than a shortcut to the Ryan-McConnell tax plan's deficit-exploding, multi-trillion dollar tax breaks for the wealthiest.

Under the dire budget cuts of the GOP budget, seniors, children, veterans, and hard-working people in every state will suffer just so that billionaires can get even bigger tax breaks – but they are just a fraction of what Republicans will demand after their tax breaks for the wealthiest one percent add trillions to the deficit.

Slate: Republicans Have a Clever Plan to Pretend Their Tax Plan Is Tough On Millionaires

Republicans have tried to frame this [tax] proposal as a way to help small businesses stay competitive—Trump himself gave a whole speech about how the cut would benefit truck drivers. But mom and pop stores and guys who haul freight for a living likely won't benefit much … The move will, however, be an enormous boon to America's millionaires.

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What Republicans are struggling with, then, isn't really whether to lower taxes on millionaires and billionaires. It's whether to give them a jumbo, new mansion-in-the-Hamptons sized tax cut, or something slightly more modest, but much harder for the public to spot.

Washington Post: Don't fall for the latest GOP trick: Republicans are still cutting taxes on the rich

Congressional Republicans, perhaps stung by the relentless Democratic accusation that their tax-cut plan is a gigantic giveaway to the wealthy, are floating a trial balloon that looks on first glance as though they might be considering not being so generous to our nation's financial elite.

But in fact, it only highlights all the different ways that Republicans are still trying to help the rich.

The New Yorker: A White House Fairy Tale About The Trump Tax Plan

Last week, the White House Council of Economic Advisers put out a paper claiming that Donald Trump's tax plan would raise average household income by at least four thousand dollars a year. Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the Council, and Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, are now having a heated public argument about that claim … Although the technical details of this dispute may seem forbidding to non-economists, the underlying story is straightforward and important: Hassett and other conservative economists are telling an outlandish fairy tale in an effort to promote a plan whose centerpiece is a tax cut for corporations and unincorporated businesses.

Instead of pushing their job-killing, seniors-betraying budget for the billionaires-first tax plan, Republicans must work with Democrats on bipartisan tax reform – vowing not one penny in tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent.