Working Parents are Clear Losers Under Trump’s Tax Plan

President Donald Trump at September event with Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.Mai/Zuma

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

While Kevin’s on vacation, we’ve invited other Mother Jones writers to contribute posts.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump said he will not personally benefit from his new tax plan. He, of course, didn’t mention that the plan eliminates a provision that cost him $31 million in 2005—one of a just a handful of years for which any of the president’s tax information is publicly available. 

“My plan is for the working people,” he boasted, “and I think very, very strongly, there’s very little benefit [in it] for people of wealth.”

But back of the envelope math suggests the truth is that working-class Americans with kids could actually pay more, or negligibly less, under Trump’s plan.

While administration officials have pledged everyone will end up getting a tax cut, the framework they’ve released is selectively specific: It clearly states how to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans, while leaving the details of working-class tax cuts exceedingly vague.

Trump’s plan reduces the seven tax brackets that exist today, which range from 10 percent to 39.6 percent, into just three brackets of 12, 25, and 35 percent. (Republicans have said they may add a fourth higher bracket.)

While the plan technically doubles the standard deduction to $12,000 for individuals and $24,000 for couples, it, as Josh Barro and Daniel Hemel have pointed out, also eliminates personal exemptions of $4,050 per adult and child that are currently tacked on to the existing, smaller standard deductions. When those exemptions are taken away, the much-hailed doubled deduction packs a lot less punch.

As a result, a married couple with two children making $50,000 per year would see their income taxes increase by nearly $900 under Trump’s plan. Republicans counter that they will “significantly” increase the current tax credit of $1,000 per child, but have yet to specify an amount. A June 2016 House Republican tax plan increased the credit by $500. If Republicans stick to that, that married couple would get a roughly $110 tax cut.

People without kids fare a bit better, because they currently only claim one of the personal exemptions proposed for elimination, while their standard deduction would still double. An individual making $35,000 per year, for example, would save about $460.

Regardless of Trump’s claims, the wealthiest Americans will benefit much more from his proposed tax plan than working Americans. A preliminary analysis from the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the top one percent of households would save about $150,000 per year—roughly 325 times what someone earning $35,000 would get. About 30 percent of all savings would go to households making over $3.8 million per year, with each getting and average annual tax cut of $800,000.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate