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Tuesday, September 25th, 2018

The Trump Administration’s Latest Tax Scam for the Rich

Author:     Robert Reich
Source:     truthdig
Publication Date:     SEP 20, 2018
 Link: The Trump Administration’s Latest Tax Scam for the Rich
Stephan:   The country is so befuddled by the endless fecal storm that swirls around the White House and the Capitol, that what the Trump administration is actually doing just gets lost. I think this is all by design by the way. You are about to get screwed again by another change in the tax code to the benefit of the rich, and to the cost of the other 99 percent of the country. I haven't even heard anyone on television mention this. But it is out there, and in SR I try to stay focused on what is real. Do I need to mention that Trump and the Republicans are just piling on public debt, so that you and I can make the rich richer, and we are now in uncharted territory because of the size of that debt.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
Credit: Gustavo Garello / AP

Hard to believe, but the Trump administration is proposing yet another massive tax windfall for the rich.

It would be to reduce their capital gains taxes. Those are taxes on the increased value of their stocks and bonds, businesses, and other valuables, when they sell them. Trump would do this by eliminating whatever portion of that increased value was due to inflation.

Here are three reasons why reducing capital gains taxes would be another tax scam for the rich.

1. The people who’d get most of the benefits are already richer than ever and pay a lower effective tax rate than they have in decades. An estimated 63 percent of the benefits of this proposal would go to the wealthiest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans, while the bottom 80 percent of us would get only 1 percent of its benefits, according to a University of Pennsylvania Wharton School analysis.

If anything, Congress should raise capital gains taxes, not lower them. The capital gains tax rate is already lower than the […]

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1 Comment

  1. Rev. Dean on Thursday, September 27, 2018 at 1:43 am

    We need another F.D.R., or someone like him. He demanded that the rich pay more in taxes because we were at war and that necessitated more spending which required more taxes. The math is simple to understand and it doesn’t take an accountant to figure that out. We should never give tax breaks during a war, and we are in a perpetual war right now, and the rich are the only ones able to afford to pay for all these wars.