The Republican War on the Capital Gains Tax
Faced with few other taxes left to cut, the Trump administration is innovating new ways to make tax revenue from investment income vanish.
On domestic policy matters, Donald Trump campaigned, like compassionate conservative George W. Bush before him, as a different kind of Republican. He vowed to spend money to fix U.S. infrastructure, protect Social Security and Medicare, and ditch business conservative orthodoxy on free trade.
Also like George W. Bush, Trump has governed like a bog-standard conservative, with only tax cuts and deregulation to show for his first few years. Only one major piece of legislation is likely to get Trumps signature in his entire first term: the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
The effects of those cuts were predictable. According to a report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, two-thirds of those cuts have gone to the top 20 percent of earners. The richest 1 percent are currently reaping more benefits than the bottom 60 percent of Americans. By 2025, those tax cuts will balloon to $10.6 trillion, with some $2 trillion flowing to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. The San Francisco Fed and others have published studies showing that theres no indication that any of this will grow the economy at all.
Massive tax giveaways to the rich are a time-honored Republican tradition. Combined, the Bush and Trump administrations have teamed up to produce two decades of massive tax breaks for the rich. From 2001 through 2018, changes to the federal tax code have reduced revenue by $5.1 trillion. Sixty-five percent of the savings has gone to the richest fifth of Americans, with 22 percent of it going exclusively to the top 1 percent.
Read more:
https://prospect.org/article/republican-war-on-capital-gains-tax
(American Prospect)