Hillary vs. Trump’s Tax Plans

The bottom small section was posted March of 2016… the updated information comes to us as a way of emboldening the comparisons between Hillary’s tax plan and Trump’s compared. With the predictions made about Trumps’ plan coming to fruition.

UPDATE

The WASHINGTON EXAMINER (Dec 2021) has a tracking of how these tax plans worked out (note the highlighted portion readers):

President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats’ Build Back Better Act would increase taxes on higher-income earners and expand business levies to help cover its $2.4 trillion price tag.

Biden and many Democrats in Congress have argued that their plan to raise taxes in the midst of an economic recovery is justified because it would help offset or reverse important elements of the Republican tax reform passed in 2017. Democrats have long claimed that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act needs to be repealed or heavily altered because it unjustly benefits the wealthy at the expense of working and middle-class families.

However, the most recent personal income tax data from the IRS prove that this claim is completely false. The 2017 tax law has disproportionately benefited lower- and middle-income working families. The data show the law has also led to substantial improvements in economic mobility for middle-income and upper-middle-income households.

A careful analysis of detailed tax data from 2017 and 2018, the first year the TCJA went into effect and the most recent year for which detailed IRS income data are available, reveals that over just one year, households with an adjusted gross income of $15,000 to $50,000 saw their total tax bills cut by an average of 16% to 26%, with most filers enjoying at least an 18% tax cut. Similarly, filers earning between $50,000 and $100,000, one of the largest groups of taxpayers, experienced a 15% to 17% tax cut, on average, from 2017 to 2018.

Higher-income households also experienced sizable tax cuts, but not nearly as large as the tax reductions provided by the law to working and middle-class families. Those with AGIs of $500,000 to $1 million, for example, had their taxes cut by less than 9%, and filers earning $5 million to $10 million received a 3.4% cut, the lowest of any bracket provided by the IRS.

The data also show that wealthier filers ended up providing a slightly higher proportion of total personal income tax revenue in 2018 than they did in 2017. In 2017, filers earning $500,000 or more provided 38.9% of all personal income tax revenues. In 2018, the same group provided 41.5% of revenues.

That means the Trump-GOP tax cuts made the income tax code more progressive than it had previously been. That’s a remarkable finding. After all, Democrats have spent the past few years insisting the TCJA provided a huge windfall to the richest income brackets while leaving everyone else behind!

Perhaps most importantly, the tax cuts caused substantial upward economic mobility. Despite an increase in the total number of tax returns filed in 2018 compared to 2017, the number of people filing who claimed an AGI of $1 to $25,000 fell by more than 2 million. But every other income bracket above $25,000 increased, with many seeing huge gains.

The number of filers claiming an AGI of $100,000 to $200,000, for example, increased by more than 1 million in a single year……

And in April of 2022 AMERICAN’S FOR TAX REFORM noted that this delve into the IRS data shows strongly that the “Trump Tax Breaks for the Rich” helped the middle class the most:

The Internal Revenue Service’s released 2019 Statistics of Income (SOI) data, the agency’s most recent available data, shows that middle income American families saw a significant tax cut – measured as the percentage decrease in “total tax liability” between 2017 and 2019 – from the Trump-Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Similarly, Americans saw significant decreases in tax liability from 2017 to 2018.

Total tax liability includes federal income taxes as well as taxes listed on IRS form 1040 such as payroll taxes including social security and Medicare taxes. The TCJA significantly reduced federal income taxes but did not modify payroll taxes. 

As the data notes, Americans with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 saw a substantial decline in their tax liability:

  • Americans with adjusted gross income (AGI) between $50,000 and $74,999 saw a 15.2 percent reduction in average tax liabilities between 2017 and 2019.  
  • Americans with AGI of between $75,000 and $99,999 saw a 15.6 percent reduction in average federal tax liability between 2017 and 2019. 

Middle-class Americans in key states were delivered significant tax cuts:

  • Floridians with AGI between $50,000 and $74,999 saw a 19.6% reduction. Floridians with AGI between $75,000 and $99,999 saw a 17.2% reduction. 
  • New Yorkers with AGI between $50,000 and $74,999 saw a 18.9% reduction. New Yorkers with AGI between $75,000 and $99,999 saw a 12.4% reduction. 
  • Californians with AGI between $50,000 and $74,999 saw a 18.4% reduction. Californians with AGI between $75,000 and $99,999 saw a 14% reduction. 

The TCJA also caused millions of Americans to see an increased child tax credit, and millions more qualified for this tax cut for the first time. The TCJA expanded the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 and raised the income thresholds so millions of families could take the credit.

The TCJA also repealed the Obamacare individual mandate tax by zeroing out the penalty. Prior to the passage of the bill, the mandate imposed a tax of up to $2,085 on households that failed to purchase government-approved healthcare. Five million people paid this in 2017, and 75 percent of these households earned less than $75,000.

[….]

Additionally, the TCJA enacted a high alternative minimum tax (AMT) exemption and raised the income level at which the exemption begins to phase out. Congress enacted the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) in 1969 following the discovery that 155 people with adjusted gross income above $200,000 had paid zero federal income tax. Over time, the AMT grew so large that millions of Americans paid the tax and millions more saw increased tax complexity. The TCJA caused the number of AMT taxpayers to fall from more than 5 million in 2017 to just 263,720 in 2018. 

For years, President Joe Biden has falsely claimed that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) passed by the Congressional Republicans and President Trump overwhelmingly benefited “the rich” and large corporations and did little or nothing to help middle class families.

Even left-leaning media outlets have (eventually) acknowledged the tax cuts benefited middle class families. The Washington Post fact-checker gave Biden’s claim that the middle class did not see a tax cut its rating of four Pinocchios. The New York Times characterized the false perception that the middle class saw no benefit from the tax cuts as a “sustained and misleading effort by liberal opponents.”  ……

Yep, another Democrat myth about Trump bites the dust. Here is the small original post:

ORIGINAL 2016 POST

This is with thanks to the US Tax Center:

(to enlarge right click on image and “open in another tab”)