President Donald Trump pitched his tax reform plan Wednesday as fitting perfectly within the nationalist agenda he ran on.
The White House is launching its effort to overhaul the tax code after multiple failures to repeal Obamacare.
“This is a revolutionary change, and the biggest winners will be middle class workers as jobs start pouring into our country, as companies start competing for American labor, and as wages continue to grow,” Trump said at a speech in Indianapolis.
He said that the tax reform will help “the everyday, hardworking Americans — the people that work so long, so hard, and they’ve been forgotten.”
The plan will reduce the amount of individual tax brackets from seven to three with tax rates of 12 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent, with an option for fourth higher tax bracket. The current lowest tax rate is ten percent and the highest is 39.6 percent.
The tax reform package put forward by the White House will also double the standard deduction for middle class individuals and married couples and increase the child tax credit. Additionally, the tax plan will eliminate the estate tax and decrease the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent.
“Our framework includes our explicit commitment that tax reform will protect low-income and middle-income households, not the wealthy and well-connected. They can call me all they want. It’s not going to help. I’m doing the right thing, and it’s not good for me. Believe me,” Trump claimed during the speech.
However, Democrats have slammed the reform package as benefiting the wealthy. “[Republicans are] going to be in for a rude awakening as the American people are going to rise up against this. It’s little more than an across-the-board tax cut for America’s millionaires and billionaires,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
The Intercept reported after Trump’s speech on one example of how the tax plan could betray Trump’s populist rhetoric. The president when touting the end of the estate tax said, “With us today is Kip Tom, a family farmer.”
It turns out that Tom is the president of a grain storage firm, CereServ Inc, that earned more than $5 million during the reporting period, according to his 2015 financial disclosure for his congressional candidate.