Top 1 percent gets biggest tax cut under Trump plan

What was that about soaking the rich? Here’s the distributional impact of Donald Trump’s tax cuts, according to the Tax Foundation (a nonpartisan, business-backed research organization):

Under two separate sets of assumptions — one accounting for possible behavioral changes that might result from the cuts (“dynamic analysis”) and one not (“static analysis”) — the top 1 percent gets the biggest break. To be specific, under dynamic analysis, the top income percentile sees its after-tax income rise by 27 percent.

For comparison, Jeb Bush’s plan, which also favored the rich, offered the top 1 percent an after-tax income boost of 16.4 percent. (Bush’s plan would also raise Bush’s after-tax income by about 18 percent, according to my calculations; Trump has claimed that his own plan would instead raise its creator’s tax burden, which seems like the opposite of the truth.)

Not that any of this has stopped Trump’s (or Bush’s) proposals from being described as populist or even as raising taxes on the rich. But hey, if politicians say something enough times, it must be true, right?

As I said in my column today: Merry Christmas, everyone! (Except fiscal conservatives and immigrants, of course.)