Against President Donald Trump’s wishes, the House’s “one, big, beautiful bill” does not include a tax increase on the wealthiest Americans.
And that’s unlikely to change in the U.S. Senate.
“What we’re seeing is the center of gravity in the Republican Party is still much closer to where it was under [2012 GOP presidential nominee] Mitt Romney than is commonly thought — there’s support for Trumpian nationalism, but it’s not the dominant disposition in the way a lot of people think it is,” said Michael Strain, economist at the American Enterprise Institute, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
“Rather than there being no Republicans who want to boost taxes on the rich, there are just very few.”
Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill passed the House 215-214-1 early Thursday morning, beating House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Memorial Day deadline.
The bill would extend Trump’s signature 2017 tax cuts, plus enact promises he made on the 2024 campaign trail to not tax tips, overtime, and interest on some auto loans. One thing it would not do is include a tax on Americans who pay the highest share of federal income tax.
Trump had pitched just that, a “millionaire tax.” His former strategist Steve Bannon, and other allies were pushing the tax.
The president called Grover Norquist on May 7 to try and convince the Americans for Tax Reform president that such a tax makes sense.
Norquist refused to budge, arguing that such a maneuver would prove a politically disastrous “attack on the small-business community,” the Post reported.
“We showed how weak and nonexistent this quote-unquote ‘movement’ for higher taxes is within the Republican Party,” Norquist said. “The House and the Senate have been in lockstep: This is not happening, period. But I’m glad we had this movement because it allowed us to expose this little cancer cell in the party pushing the idea.”
Critics of the House legislation say it disproportionately benefits taxpayers at the top of the income distribution, though most of the bill’s more than $2.5 trillion price tag comes from measures that primarily benefit middle-class taxpayers, the Post reported.
The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that people earning between $30,000 and $80,000 would pay around 15% less in taxes in 2027.
Jessica Riedl, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, estimated that roughly 30% of the benefits of the House GOP bill would go to corporations and those earning more than $400,000 per year.
Kyle Pomerleau, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, estimated that the biggest beneficiaries of the bill would be those earning between $460,800 and $1.1 million per year. After that, the top 1% are the biggest winners.
“It’s a complete shifting of resources up to the wealthiest Americans — that’s the bottom line of it,” said Steve Wamhoff, a tax policy expert at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the Post said.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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