Word: Who the Trump tax cuts really helped

Frank Clemente and William Rice, LA Timeds -President Trump’s radical Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which took effect Jan. 1, 2018, has now been around long enough for a fair assessment. The verdict’s not good. The second anniversary is an apt time to review some of the law’s biggest failures — especially since the president is inviting more trouble by considering another tax-cut boondoggle as an election-year ploy.

Rushed through Congress by a Republican majority, the Trump-GOP tax cuts were promoted as a boon for the middle class. Yet in 2020, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the richest 1% of taxpayers will get an average tax cut of around $50,000, 75 times more than the average cut for the bottom 80%.

One big reason the law is so skewed toward the wealthy is that it gives corporations huge tax breaks. It’s primarily the wealthy who own corporations through their stock holdings...

The flip side of the phony claim that the tax cuts were targeted at the middle class was the equally false idea that they wouldn’t help rich people such as Trump, who asserted that his law would “cost me a fortune.” But Trump and his family have undoubtedly benefited by millions of dollars from at least five features of the law, ranging from lower top tax rates to a weakened estate tax. Of course, we can’t be sure exactly how much they’ve saved because Trump refuses to release his tax returns.

Trump promised his corporate tax cuts would result in an average pay raise of $4,000 for working families. His top economic advisor more than doubled down on that guarantee, saying the raise could be $9,000 and that higher wages would quickly follow passage of the plan.

Census data show that median family income instead grew by about $500 in the first year after the tax cuts, the smallest annual increase in five years. A close look at Bureau of Labor Statistics figures shows that the growth rate in wages was just 0.4% in the two years since the tax cut. Compare that with wage growth of 0.7% in the last two years of President Obama’s administration.