CA Dems May Confiscate Half of Tax Cut Savings
A lawmaker claims, “Trump’s tax reform plan was nothing more than a middle-class tax increase.” This is flat-out wrong.
A California state lawmaker from San Francisco, Phil Ting, is just one of the many Democrats nationwide who are mulling over how to take advantage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. He along with his Sacramento colleague, Kevin McCarty, have introduced a bill that would collect half of what million-dollar-plus corporations gain from the newly reduced 21% corporate tax rate. Their assertion is that a chunk of corporate tax savings should be rerouted and invested in programs geared toward non-wealthy residents. Because, according to Ting, “Trump’s tax reform plan was nothing more than a middle-class tax increase.”
That’s an interesting and untruthful argument to make. Polling suggests voters are already seeing the light on tax reform. What was an 18-point Democrat lead in generic polling has shrunk to just a five-point lead. And why shouldn’t it? Democrats are absolutely out of their minds if they really think Americans aren’t reaping tax reform’s benefits. To mention nothing of bonuses, “some two million American workers have already been told that their earnings are going up,” Jeff Jacoby reports, citing data from American for Tax Reform. That’s also to say nothing of the remarkable stock market performance.
The complete distortion of tax reform by lawmakers like Ting and McCarty is business as usual in California. The state ranks dead last when it comes to poverty, and it’s because of the Golden State’s longtime obsession with redistributing people’s wealth. The new scheme revolves around the tax bill’s changes to write-offs, which blue states wrongly argue is unfair. On the contrary, Democrats selfishly don’t want to lower local taxes to alleviate tax reform’s impacts.
But California also can’t afford to confiscate corporate tax savings. To do so would only worsen the great blue state exodus. In March 2017, the American Legislative Exchange Council reported that “the economic pain inflicted by Golden State government has induced more than a million Californians in just the past decade to seek better opportunities elsewhere.” What makes the state think corporations would put up with having their savings stolen from them? It’s California politics, not nationwide tax reform, that needs to change.
