Tax unfairness soars under Donald Trump

Three incredible hypotheses, one after another, underscore the direction of the U.S. tax code over the past few decades. They appear in early 2021 book “Tax the rich!” : How lies, loopholes and lobbyists make the rich richer. »

Shock after shock, here they are:

“If you had worked every day since Columbus left for America until today and made $5,000 a day, you would still have less money than Jeff Bezos makes in a week.”

“If you had earned $100,000 every day since 1 AD and saved every penny, you would still have less money than Bill Gates.”

“If you had started working when the human race, Home Sapiensfirst walked upright, about 200,000,000 years ago, and saved $100,000 a year, you still wouldn’t have as much money as Mark Zuckerberg.

All three of these things are not only true, they are completely true: the “if” dollar totals are much lower than the actual dollar totals raised by Zuckerberg, Doors And Bezos. Now comes David Kamin from NYU wwith real-world analysis of the numbers, taking into account the continuing effects of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill for 2025 and his tax and jobs cuts for his first term. Act. According to Kamin, the sirens are already sounding.

Listen to a key paragraph from his special report in Tax Notes last month:

“This report begins to define the scale of the challenge ahead. It describes how the policy models followed over the past several decades could mean the triumph of a more regressive and unfair vision of (our) tax and tax system than what seemed achievable just a few years ago – and with the attendant harm to millions of low- and middle-income Americans who would bear a heavier tax burden as a result.”

Some of these burdens come from House Bill 2025’s “significant cuts to health care, nutrition assistance, student aid, and clean energy subsidies.” In short, America is heading into the future with a double-whammy tax code—one that leans even more in favor of the wealthy and reserves its greed and lessons to be learned. everyone other. As a percentage of their income, the poorest 20% will be hit hardest by this year’s bill.

Estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) show just how much biased the legislation reads: “Over the next decade, (the bill) will reduce taxes on the richest 10 percent of Americans by more than $14,700 per year per household and reduce taxes on the richest 1 percent of Americans by more than $50,000 per year. » CBO and JCT estimates also show that the bill increases the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years.

THE last The more than 100 provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill won’t take effect for another ten years. It’s called “Delayed Implementation of New Regulations That Protect Student Borrowers,” words that identify only a few million people who are sure to be harmed.

Republicans supported the bill almost unanimously. Vice versa, each Democrats in the House and Senate voted against it. Here’s a look at one of the worst provisions in a bill that ultimately got 266 Republican “yes” and 257 Democratic “no” votes.

As recently as 2017, the estate tax exemption for a married couple was just under $11 million. The 2017 Asset The tax bill more than doubled that amount, and his One Big Beautiful Bill puts the exemption at its highest level ever. It will rise to $30 million for a couple in 2026 – a near tripling of the estate tax exemption granted by the two Trump administrations, all benefiting the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. These numbers mean that the largest untaxed fortunes in American history will now pass from one generation to the next (or, in other words, the federal government will not receive a cent in tax revenue when these fortunes are passed on to their heirs).

As if this were not enough to reduce taxes in the future, the bill understand a last-minute corporate gift of $16 billion, retroactive to January 16 of this year. It allows businesses to deduct the costs of assets immediately rather than over their entire lifespan. News of his possible passage furious Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts: “The last thing American families need is an even more rigged tax code for billionaires and billion-dollar corporations.”

In the end, America didn’t get the One Big Beautiful Bill. Just as Warren feared, what America really got was One Big Ugly Bill.

Scorse writes about taxes.