Trump Tax Cuts Are About to Become a Political Disaster

Trump and GOP leadership grinning as they screwed millions on taxes.

Anyone who paid attention to the details of the Trump/GOP tax cuts should have known that the middle class and small business owners were going to get screwed over royally as almost all of the significant cuts when to the extremely wealthy and large corporations.  Add the scam of juggling payroll withholding to artificially inflate take home pay by small to modest amounts with the GOP knowing full well that come April, 2019, the taxpayers would finally realize that they had been had and its a recipe for political disaster.  Yet many in the GOP base in particular bought the GOP lie  since they have become a group immune to facts and the real truth.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the political reckoning that may be about to hit.  Here are excerpts:

At about this time one year ago, things weren’t looking good for the GOP. In the wake of a special Senate election in Alabama — in which the Republican Party had rallied behind the failed candidacy of a theocratic ephebophile — Democrats had jumped out to a commanding lead in the congressional generic ballot. Money was flooding into Team Blue’s campaign coffers. Republican incumbents were heading for the revolving doors.

But GOP operatives insisted that the “blue wave” on the horizon would crest long before November — because the Trump tax cuts were about to kick in. Once voters saw fatter paychecks, Republicans would see better poll numbers. And just to be sure that voters noticed all the good Paul Ryan had done for them, the Trump administration reportedly pressured the IRS to err on the side of withholding too little from Americans’ paychecks “so people will see big increases in their take-home pay ahead of this year’s midterm elections.”

This did not work out as planned. Even with (allegedly) light withholding, the the tax bill’s breaks for middle-class people weren’t large enough to attract much notice. Between changes in salaries, health-care premiums, and 401(k) contributions, most Americans didn’t detect much tax relief in their paychecks. The Trump tax cuts actually became less popular after they took effect. And, of course, Paul Ryan’s majority drowned in a blue wave.

Now, the bill for the GOP’s (reported) withholding shenanigans is coming due: The average American’s tax refund was 8.4 percent lower in the first week of 2019 than it was one year ago (under the pre-Trump tax code). And while Americans have trouble noticing tax changes when they’re dispersed across 12 to 24 separate paychecks, they do typically pay very close attention to the size of their refunds. . . . for many of those households, that check from the IRS is the largest lump sum they’ll receive all year.

In other words: It looks as though the Republican Party implemented their signature tax bill in a manner that will lead many people who received tax cuts to believe that Donald Trump raised their taxes.

[I]t isn’t 100 percent certain that the IRS’s withholding tables were way off. But current evidence suggests they were. And if that’s the case, then the GOP’s efforts to game withholding won’t just lend credence to the Democrats’ most hyperbolic attacks on the Trump tax cuts — they could also depress economic growth as the 2020 campaign gets underway.

Running for reelection on the strength of a failed attempt to throw millions off of health insurance — and a tax cut that did a lot for the rich, and only a little for the middle class — seems hard. Doing so after you’ve accidentally led millions of Americans to (falsely) believe that you raised their taxes seems harder.