Trump's White House accidentally admitted the truth about its tax plan
The word "transparency" certainly does not describe President Donald Trump's second administration. Whereas during his first term, for example, transcriptions of all of his remarks were published, a HuffPost analysis found that less than a quarter of his speeches, press conferences and media availabilities have been transcribed for posterity four months into his second term.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that earlier this week the White House published evidence that the president's "big, beautiful bill" hikes taxes on the poor to cut taxes for the rich.
On a page entitled "ICYMI: 'Average earners' tax bills would fall under House tax package, forecasters say,'" the White House includes a link with the text "Click here to see the official analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation." The Joint Committee on Taxation is a nonpartisan committee that, among other duties, produces distribution tables breaking down how different income levels will be impacted by new tax laws.
As Aaron Fritschner, chief of staff to Democratic Rep. Don Beyer, pointed out, the JCT report that the White House itself touted includes a rather unflattering data point about its tax plan — at least regarding some of the most vulnerable taxpayers.
In 2029, Americans making less than $30,000 will actually pay more in taxes under the GOP's plan than under current law. Americans making less than $15,000 — the poorest of the poor — will pay 53% more in taxes than they do now as their average tax rate jumps from 3.3% to 5.1%. Meanwhile, households making over a million will pay 6.4% less in taxes (totaling an estimated $74 billion collectively), as their average rate falls from 30.8% to 28.7%.
Americans making over $30,000 will get a tax cut, according to the JCT. But those numbers, as Brendan Duke of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, do not include other tax law changes such as the higher threshold for the estate tax, or the cuts to programs like SNAP and Medicaid that primarily benefit the poor, or the effects of the president's tariffs. When you add those, the benefits of the Republican bill become even more skewed towards the richest Americans. In fact, the New York Times reports that economists at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, another nonpartisan outfit, "found that many Americans who make less than $51,000 a year would see their after-tax income fall as a result of the Republican proposal beginning in 2026."
The White House prefers to highlight the JCT's estimates for 2027, when only Americans making less than $15,000 face a tax increase and decreases across the board are higher. This is because the current GOP bill front-loads a bunch of temporary new tax breaks. And while the cuts most generous to the wealthy (such as the higher estate tax threshold) are permanent, other cuts, such as the "senior bonus" that replaces Trump's promise of "no tax on Social Security," expire just days before the end of Trump's term. How effective such time-limited cuts would be is questionable. Don't take it from me: Adam Michel, the director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, dismissed the short-term cuts as 'simply giveaways to targeted demographics.'
But for a brief window, Trump and company can pretend their bill helps everyone — assuming you don't count those cuts to Medicaid SNAP, or the sweeping tariffs that, no matter how much Trump insists otherwise, are taxes.
For the moment, the GOP's mega-bill is stalled after five Republicans voted against advancing it out of the House Budget Committee Friday. The committee is set to reconvene late Sunday evening. But don't get your hopes up: the holdouts were more conservative representatives who want even more spending cuts to programs like Medicaid. For them, poor Americans' suffering isn't a budgetary bug; it's a feature.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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Amid the storm of executive orders issued by Trump in the early days of his second term was one that sought to redefine birthright citizenship by barring it for children of parents who are in the U.S. unlawfully. Another would overhaul how federal elections are run, among other changes requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship. Courts so far have blocked both orders. The Constitution says that 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.' It also leaves the administration of elections to the states. The case in Whittier began with Pese's wife, Tupe Smith. After the couple moved to Whittier in 2018, Smith began volunteering at the Whittier Community School, where nearly half of the 55 students were American Samoan — many of them her nieces and nephews. She would help the kids with their English, tutor them in reading and cook them Samoan dishes. 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Supporters of automatic citizenship say it would particularly benefit the estimated 150,000 to 160,000 nationals who live in the states, many of them in California, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Utah and Alaska. 'We pay taxes, we do exactly the same as everybody else that are U.S. citizens,' Smith said. 'It would be nice for us to have the same rights as everybody here in the states.' Legal questions over status to be tested anew But many in American Samoa eventually soured on the idea, fearing that extending birthright citizenship would jeopardize its customs — including the territory's communal land laws. Island residents could be dispossessed by land privatization, not unlike what happened in Hawaii, said Siniva Bennett, board chair of the Samoa Pacific Development Corporation, a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit. 'We've been able to maintain our culture, and we haven't been divested from our land like a lot of other indigenous people in the U.S.,' Bennett said. 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Finally, last year, Carol Beecher, the head of the state Division of Elections, sent Toleafoa's group a letter saying American Samoans are not eligible to vote in Alaska elections. But by then, the voting forms had been signed. 'It is my hope that this is a lesson learned, that the state of Alaska agrees that this could be something that we can administratively correct,' Toleafoa said. 'I would say that the state could have done that instead of prosecuting community members.' ___ Bohrer reported from Juneau, Alaska, and Johnson from Seattle. Claire Rush in Portland, Oregon, and Jennifer Sinco Kelleher in Honolulu contributed to this report.
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36 minutes ago
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WHITTIER, Alaska — They were born on U.S. soil, are entitled to U.S. passports and allowed to serve in the U.S. military, but 11 people in a small Alaska town are facing criminal charges after they tried to participate in a fundamental part of American democracy: voting. The defendants, who range in age from their 20s to their 60s, were all born in American Samoa — the only U.S. territory where residents are not automatically granted citizenship at birth. Prosecutors say they falsely claimed American citizenship when registering or trying to vote.
