Taxes

Report: The GOP Tax Plan Will Hike Taxes on Low-Income People

Written by SK Ashby

According to the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), Americans earning as little as $10,000 will see their taxes go up under the Senate Republican tax cut bill, and that's just the beginning.

Taxes on people making between $10,000 and $30,000 would increase in 2021 (just 2 years after the bill takes effect in 2019) and then again at the end of 2026 when the meager benefits included in the bill, such as a higher standard deduction, expire.

Tax hikes for households earning $10,000 to $30,000 would start in 2021 and grow sharply from there. By the year 2027, Americans earning $30,000 to $75,000 a year would also be forced to pay more in taxes even though people earning over $100,000 continue to get substantial tax cuts. [...]

The decision to include a repeal of the individual mandate would lead to 13 million more uninsured, the Congressional Budget Office has said. Senate Republicans also made most of the individual income tax provisions expire at the end of 2025, which is why most taxpayers below $75,000 end up paying more after a decade.

The JCT has calculated the loss of health care coverage as a tax increase because coverage will become more expensive and those who don't have coverage will pay for subsidies through their tax dollars even if they aren't receiving a subsidy.

Republican say that's not a fair calculation to make because subsidies are paid to insurers, not individuals, but that's not entirely true. It may be technically true, but it's not the spirit of the law.

In any case, these changes all come in service of making tax cuts for corporations and the rich permanent. The end game is a permanent tax hike on the working class to make tax cuts for the rich permanent.

To be clear, the Joint Committee on Taxation is not some partisan think tank or third party, it's a nonpartisan congressional committee that performs a function similar to the Congressional Budget Office.