WASHINGTON
— The tax plan that the Trump administration outlined on Wednesday is a
potentially huge windfall for the wealthiest Americans. It would not
directly benefit the bottom third of the population. As for the middle
class, the benefits appear to be modest.
The
administration and its congressional allies are proposing to sharply
reduce taxation of business income, primarily benefiting the small share
of the population that owns the vast majority of corporate equity.
President Trump said on Wednesday that the cuts would increase
investment and spur growth, creating broader prosperity. But experts say
the upside is limited, not least because the economy is already
expanding.
The
plan would also benefit Mr. Trump and other affluent Americans by
eliminating the estate tax, which affects just a few thousand
uber-wealthy families each year, and the alternative minimum tax, a
safety net designed to prevent tax avoidance.
The
precise impact on Mr. Trump cannot be ascertained because the president
refuses to release his tax returns, but the few snippets of returns
that have become public show one thing clearly: The alternative minimum
tax has been unkind to Mr. Trump. In 2005, it forced him to pay $31 million in additional taxes.
Mr.
Trump has also pledged repeatedly that the plan would reduce the taxes
paid by middle-class families, but he has not provided enough details to
evaluate that claim. While some households would probably get tax cuts,
others could end up paying more.
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The
plan would not benefit lower-income households that do not pay federal
income taxes. The president is not proposing measures like a reduction
in payroll taxes, which are paid by a much larger share of workers, nor
an increase in the earned-income tax credit, which would expand wage
support for the working poor.
Indeed, to call the plan “tax reform” seems like a stretch — Mr. Trump himself told conservative and evangelical leaders on Monday that it was more apt to refer to his plan as “tax cuts.”
Mr. Trump’s proposal echoes the large tax cuts that President Ronald
Reagan, in 1981, and President George W. Bush, in 2001, passed in the
first year of their terms, not the 1986 overhaul of the tax code that he
often cites. Like his Republican predecessors, Mr. Trump says cutting
taxes will increase economic growth.
“It’s
time to take care of our people, to rebuild our nation and to fight for
our great American workers,” Mr. Trump told a crowd in Indianapolis.
But
the moment is very different. Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush cut taxes during
recessions. Mr. Trump is proposing to cut taxes during one of the
longest economic expansions in American history. It is not clear that
the economy can grow much faster; the Federal Reserve has warned that it will seek to offset any stimulus by raising interest rates.
At
the time of the earlier cuts, the federal debt was considerably
smaller. The public portion of the debt equaled 24 percent of the gross
domestic product in 1981, and 31 percent in 2001. In June, the debt
equaled 75 percent of economic output.
The
Trump administration insists that its tax cut will catalyze such an
economic boom that money will flow into the federal coffers and the debt
will not rise. The Reagan and Bush administrations made similar claims.
The debt soared in both instances.
Another issue: Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Reagan proposed to cut taxes when federal revenues had climbed unusually high as a share of the national economy.
Mr. Trump wants to cut taxes while revenues are close to an average level.
Since
1981, federal revenue has averaged 17.1 percent of the nation’s gross
domestic product, while federal spending has averaged 20.3 percent.
Last
year’s numbers were close to the long-term trend: Federal revenue was
17.5 percent of gross domestic product; spending was 20.7 percent.
Graphic
Six Charts That Help Explain the Republican Tax Plan
The proposal lowers rates for individuals and corporations but leaves key elements up to Congress.
Martin
Feldstein, a Harvard University economics professor and a longtime
adviser to Republican presidents, said that the moment was not perfect,
but that Mr. Trump should nevertheless press ahead because the changes
would be valuable.
“The debt is moving in the wrong direction,” Mr. Feldstein said. “But the tax reform is moving in the right direction.”
Proponents
of the plan assert that the largest benefits are indirect. In
particular, they argue that cutting corporate taxes will unleash
economic growth.
Mr.
Trump’s plan is more focused on business tax cuts than the Reagan and
Bush plans, and economists agree that this makes economic gains more
likely.
The
key elements are large reductions in the tax rates for business income:
To 20 percent for corporations, and to 25 percent for “pass-through”
businesses, a broad category that includes everything from mom-and-pop
neighborhood shops to giant investment partnerships, law firms — and
real estate developers.
The plan also lets businesses immediately deduct the full cost of new investments.
“You’re
going to get a boost in investment,” said William Gale, co-director of
the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. “It’s hard to argue that there won’t
be a positive effect.”
But Mr. Gale added that there are reasons to think it would be modest.
The
most important is that the economy is already growing at a faster pace
than the Fed considers sustainable. “Economy roaring,” Mr. Trump tweeted
on Wednesday.
Also,
interest rates are low, and nonfinancial companies are sitting on $1.84
trillion that they don’t want to spend. “It’s not lack of funds that’s
stopping companies from investing,” Mr. Gale said.
And
the stimulus would come at the cost of increased federal borrowing.
Interest rates might not rise if foreigners provide the necessary money,
as happened in the 1980s and the 2000s, but that means some of the
benefits also end up abroad.
It’s a venerable principle that lower tax rates encourage corporate investment. But a study of a 2003 cut in the tax rate on corporate dividends
found no discernible impact on investment. The finding would not have
surprised Mr. Bush’s Treasury secretary at the time, Paul O’Neill, who
was fired for opposing the plan. “You find somebody who says, ‘I do more
R & D because I get a tax credit for it,’ you’ll find a fool,” Mr.
O’Neill, a former Alcoa chairman, said at the time.
Mr.
Trump’s plan also continues a long-term march away from progressive
taxation. The federal income tax is the centerpiece of a longstanding
bipartisan consensus that wealthy Americans should pay an outsize share
of the cost of government.
But
successive rounds of tax cuts have eroded that premise, according to
research by the economists Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of
Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley.
In 1980, the wealthiest Americans paid 59 percent of their income in
taxes while the middle 20 percent of Americans paid 24.5 percent. After
the Bush tax cuts, the wealthiest Americans paid 34.7 percent of their
income in taxes, while Americans in the middle income brackets paid 16.1
percent.
Under
President Barack Obama, Congress increased taxation of upper-income
households. Mr. Trump is seeking to resume the long-term trend toward
flattening the curve. Upper-income households would get large tax cuts;
lower-income households would get none.
The
exact impact on the middle class is not yet clear. The outline released
Wednesday proposes new tax brackets but does not specify income
thresholds. It also proposes to replace the current tax deduction for
each dependent with a child tax credit — but the administration did not
propose a dollar amount for that new credit.
The
administration said Wednesday that it was committed “to ensure that the
reformed tax code is at least as progressive as the existing tax code.”
That language, however, applies only to personal income taxes. The
proposed reduction of business taxes and the elimination of the estate
tax would both disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans.
“I
don’t think there’s any way to justify this as a progressive proposal,”
said Lily Batchelder, a law professor at New York University who served
as deputy director of Mr. Obama’s National Economic Council. “In broad
brush strokes, they’re doing nothing for the bottom 35 percent, they’re
doing very little and possibly raising taxes on the middle class, and
they’ve specified tax cuts for the wealthy.”
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