Dylan Matthews · Tuesday, December 08, 2015, 5:48 pm
The Tax Policy Center — one of the only nonpartisan economic think tanks respected on both sides of the aisle in Washington — has mostly been quiet during the Republican presidential primary season. Though Republicans have been releasing plenty of tax plans, most have lacked sufficient detail for a thorough TPC analysis.
But on Tuesday, TPC broke the pattern and announced that it had run the numbers on Jeb Bush's tax plan. The results: The plan would increase the deficit by $6.8 trillion over 10 years, and gains, both percentage-wise and in dollar terms, are way, way higher for the richest Americans:
It's pretty regressive
Tax Policy Center: How each percentile fares under Jeb Bush's tax plan.
Overall, the findings are very similar to an earlier analysis by the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice, summarized in the chart here. [Click on link below to see chart] CTJ had estimated that the cut would cost $7.1 trillion, nearly identical to TPC's $6.8 trillion estimate. The new analysis actually finds worse results, distributionally, than the initial one. CTJ found that the poorest 20 percent would see a 2.1 percent or $316 tax cut, while the top 1 percent would get 10.2 percent or $177,246; TPC's numbers are 1.4 percent/$251 and 11.9 percent/$273,332 respectively.
Let me repeat that, because it's important. The typical low-income American will get $251 under Bush's plan. The typical one-percenter will get $273,332. The typical 0.1-percenter will get $1.26 million. Overall, TPC finds that 70.8 percent of the cost of the tax cut comes from giveaways to the top 20 percent. Nearly half the cost (46.2 percent) consists of giveaways to the top 1 percent. And nearly a quarter (22 percent) goes to the top 0.1 percent.
[And the cost will go directly to the national deficit.]
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