Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom via ZUMA
Last night, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its analysis of the Senate tax bill. The report concludes that the GOP’s tax bill is bad for the poor from the get-go and ends up eventually raising taxes on the middle class too. Per the Washington Post:
By 2019, Americans earning less than $30,000 a year would be worse off under the Senate bill, CBO found. By 2021, Americans earning $40,000 or less would be net losers, and by 2027, most people earning less than $75,000 a year would be worse off. On the flip side, millionaires and those earning $100,000 to $500,000 would be big beneficiaries, according to the CBO’s calculations.
The main reason the poor get hit so hard in the Senate GOP bill is because the poor would receive less government aid for health care.
The Senate Republican tax bill eliminates the requirement that almost all Americans purchase health insurance or else pay a penalty. The CBO has calculated that health insurance premiums would rise if this bill becomes law, leading 4 million Americans to lose health insurance by 2019 and 13 million to lose insurance by 2027.
As Kevin Drum notes, this will hurt Trump’s supporters the hardest: “It’s yet another way that Donald Trump is screwing the very people who put him in office. Most of these folks don’t seem to realize it, though. They’ll either blame Democrats or else shrug and figure that at least Trump hates the same people they do.”
If you analyze the effects of the bill without the individual mandate repeal, then all income brackets get a tax cut through 2026, according to the Joint Committee On Taxation. But the bill, as currently written, does in fact repeal the individual mandate.
The CBO also found that the bill would add $1.4 trillion to the debt.
Read the report in full below:
