INDIANAPOLIS – Even as criticism of the proposal continued to pile up, Senate Republicans passed the final version of the McConnell tax bill with a bare partisan majority late last night, sending it back to the House once again and washing their hands of the unpopular bill.
The McConnell bill has moved through Congress with minimal transparency at every stage. As a result, new loopholes and details of the bill continued to emerge even as the Senate engaged in final debate over the bill hours before it passed.
For instance, new reports in recent days from the Tax Policy Center have made clear that the McConnell bill is even worse than had been previously thought:
- In 2027, a majority of taxpayers ultimately will pay a higher rate in taxes than they do now, and the tax cut for Americans overall will be an average of just 0.2%.
- At the same time, the top one percent of Americans will receive a whopping 83% of the tax cuts that remain.
- The one percent, who already earn $5.1 million or more a year, would get back more than $148,000 on average. That’s nearly three times the median Hoosier’s current income of $50,400.
- Even after Republicans waged a battle amongst themselves over access to the child tax credit, lower-income Americans still would receive only $60 on average under the McConnell plan. Americans in the 95th to 99th percentiles of the income scale, meanwhile, would get about $13,500 back on average. That’s an incredible 224 times as much as the credit for those at the bottom of the spectrum who need it most.
These numbers are in addition to the numerous problems with the McConnell bill that already came to light. Analyses from both the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and The University of Pennsylvania demonstrate that the plan may add as much as $2.2 trillion to the national debt. Meanwhile, a Suffolk University/USA Today poll found that the McConnell bill was one of the least popular pieces of major legislation in the last three decades, largely because it raises taxes on millions of middle-class Americans to create more tax breaks for the wealthiest among us and corporations who ship jobs to other countries.
“Americans have been swamped with information on how bad this tax bill is, yet Senate Republicans were so desperate to help Mitch McConnell’s special interest allies that they still passed his bill,” said Will Baskin-Gerwitz, Senior Media Strategist for the Indiana Democratic Party. “Middle class Hoosiers deserve a tax code that works for them, and that’s why Joe Donnelly repeatedly tried to reach across the aisle to build a bipartisan plan that helps working families. Unfortunately, Republicans have repeatedly shown they were more interested in blowing up the national debt to help the wealthy Americans who need it the least.”
###