Trump's Big CON: He Laughs at His Supporters, CONt.

UPDATE:  "There is probably no better illustration of the scam President Trump’s tax plan would perpetrate on working- and middle-class people than its provision repealing the estate tax. Getting rid of it would benefit a tiny slice of high earners and their families — including Trump’s family, who could save as much as $1 billion once Trump moves on to delivering an accounting for his life to his maker.

Yet Trump has absurdly sold estate-tax repeal as a huge boon to “millions” of small businesses and even to 'the American farmer.'

Trump will now introduce a new trope to his pitch for estate-tax repeal: He will claim it helps truckers. . .

I spoke this morning to David Cay Johnston, a veteran tax reporter who has written numerous books on how the wealthy game the tax system to their advantage. When I ran this claim about the estate tax by Johnston, he burst out laughing and dismissed the assertion as 'absurd' and a 'scam.'

As it is, Trump has already dissembled madly about estate-tax repeal. His recent claim that “millions” of small businesses and farms would be helped was neatly debunked by the Post fact-checking team. As the Tax Policy Center points out, estates with a gross value of under $5.49 million are exempt from the estate tax; more than two-thirds of taxable estates come from the top 10 percent of earners and nearly one-fourth come from the top 1 percent. This means that in 2017, only 80 taxable estates would have qualified as farms and small businesses.

Johnston ran the math for me on trucking companies. His conclusion: The number of trucking businesses that would be helped by estate tax repeal is likely to be around 30 or lower, and that’s being 'very generous,' he said. . .

This use of trucking families as a symbol of the alleged unfairness of the estate tax appears to be something new. For many, many years, Republicans pushing the estate tax have cited the American family farm as a symbol of that unfairness. Going back to at least the George W. Bush administration, the argument has been that estate-tax repeal is necessary to save the family farm and allow it to be transferred to future generations. But as Johnston has written, the notion of the family farm broken up by the estate tax was largely a myth.

Now the family owned trucking business looks like it is on its way to becoming the new family farm. It’s unclear whether Trump will merely argue that estate-tax repeal is good for truckers in some general sense, or whether he will argue more specifically that repeal is necessary to prevent IRS bureaucrats from breaking up the hallowed family-owned trucking business and preventing it from getting passed down to the next generation of hard-working American truckers. But if he does, the administration should be called on this, too.

'Show us the actual cases,' Johnston said. 'This is just another phony claim to protect billionaires from paying taxes on the gains over their lifetime. This is a political scam. Show us the trucking companies that went out of business.'"

Read the Washington Post, This may be Trump’s most insulting scam yet. 

"Conscientious analysts on the right and left may have differences on tax policy, but they agree on one thing: You could not do better than the White House’s proposed tax plan if your intention was to increase the gap between rich and poor. . .

Moreover, if one suspects that Republicans intend to cut domestic programs (as they attempted to do with Medicaid) to partially pay for lopsided tax cuts for the rich, the wealth gap would widen further. Quite simply, taking from the poor and allowing the rich to get richer will widen social and economic stratification. If you think that is a recipe for economic failure, social instability and political extremism, this should concern you greatly.

The blatant sop to the rich also alarms some conservative scholars. At the American Enterprise Institute, Angela Rachidi sees that [low-income families are] entirely excluded from any benefits from the tax plan . . .

And, of course, taking away social services to fund tax cuts that the poor don’t receive adds insult to injury. . .

This isn’t rocket science. It’s simply a matter of whether Republicans want to cement their reputation as self-serving defenders of the rich and powerful or instead want to make good on their supposed philosophy that work is the most essential element in fighting poverty. Unfortunately, in championing the rich over the poor, the party perpetuates the impression that capitalism robs from the poor to reward the rich; that’s not capitalism — its Republicanism in the Trump era."

Read the Washington Post, It pays to be rich in the Trump era.

Read also Trump's Big CON: He Laughs at His Supporters.