Counties won by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stand to benefit more from House Republicans’ plan to “repeal and replace” Obamacare than counties that supported President Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
Taxpayers in counties that backed Clinton are likely to see about $21.9 billion in tax cuts over the next decade. In contrast, counties that supported Trump will only see an estimated $6.6 billion returned to their pockets, according to analysis by Bloomberg analysts.
It isn’t just Clinton supporters that are likely to reap the majority of tax-related benefits of “Trumpcare.”
The two initial tax cuts rolled out in the GOP platform to repeal Obamacare–the American Health Care Act–deliver nearly $144 billion back to taxpayers earning over $1 million a year, according to initial analysis out of the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. The proposed bill would peel back two key taxes imposed in 2010 to keep Obamacare solvent: a 0.9 percent Medicare tax on wages and a 3.8 percent tax on capital gains and other investment income.
In total, repealing both taxes is estimated to cut the total tax burden on Americans by about $274 billion over the next decade. The bulk of those tax cuts, however, benefit the wealthiest households over middle and low-income families, according to a report out of The Tax Policy Center. Some 60 percent of the total sum will reportedly go to those with incomes over $1 million a year or more.
“The effects are really very dramatic. We found that a typical middle-income family would get a tax cut averaging about $300, while people in the top 0.1 percent would get a tax cut of about $207,000,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at The Tax Policy Center, told reporters. The effective tax cuts amount to 2.6 percent of a wealthy household’s after-tax income, compared to just 0.5 percent of a middle-class family making between $51,600 to $89,400 a year.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its budgetary analysis of the GOP platform Monday. The non-partisan budget agency reported that by 2018, “14 million more people would be uninsured under,” the proposed bill than under the current Obamacare system. Even worse, the CBO projects that some 24 million would be left without insurance by 2026 if the new bill is adopted.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is less than concerned about the new CBO estimates. The new report actually, “exceeded my expectations,” Ryan said Monday on Fox News’s “Special Report with Brett Baier.” While the figures showing massive declines in the number of insured Americans, Ryan says this is all part of the platform.
“Of course they’re going to say if we stop forcing people to buy something they don’t want to buy they’re not going to buy it,” Ryan said Monday. “That’s why you have these uninsured numbers, which we all expected.”
Despite the onslaught of negative predictions coming out of both congressional oversight committees and think-tanks, the speaker believes the primary figures to look at are the CBO projections for 2020–the year the bill would take full-effect. “It will lower premiums 10 percent. It stabilizes the market. It’s a $1.2 trillion spending cut, and $883 billion tax cut and $337 billion in deficit reduction,” Ryan said. “So, this compared to the status quo is far better.”
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