Opinion | $111 Billion in Tax Cuts for the Top 1 Percent

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First, let’s try a little thought experiment: Whenever President Trump starts talking about NATO, imagine what Vladimir Putin would want Trump to say. Then compare it to what Trump actually says. The two are often frighteningly similar.

The pattern continued yesterday and today, with Trump disparaging NATO members on Twitter, on his way out of Washington and again when arriving at the NATO summit in Europe. Why is Trump doing this? I don’t know. But I do know the effect it’s having. Defying his own aides and senators from both parties, the president of the United States is jeopardizing the Western alliance that has done so much good over the past seven decades — and he is comforting Western Europe’s biggest modern enemy, Putin’s Russia.

More inequality? Yes, please. Federal tax policy in the 21st century has been like a tug of war. Thanks to President Trump, the rich are winning it once again.

The top-earning 1 percent of households — those earning more than $607,000 a year — will pay a combined $111 billion less this year in federal taxes than they would have if the laws had remained unchanged since 2000. That’s an enormous windfall. It’s more, in total dollars, than the tax cut received over the same period by the entire bottom 60 percent of earners, according to an analysis being published today.

Think of it this way: Income inequality has soared in recent decades, with the wealthy pulling away from everyone else and the upper-middle-class doing better than the working class or poor. Yet our federal government has responded by aggravating these trends. It has handed huge tax cuts to the small segment of Americans who need those tax cuts the least.

“Most Americans would look at that and say ‘That’s not fair, and that’s not the result that we wanted from our lawmakers,’ ” says Steve Wamhoff of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington research group that conducted the new study. Polls support his argument. The Trump tax cut still isn’t popular with voters.

For their analysis, Wamhoff and his colleague Matthew Gardner tallied all of the major federal tax cuts and tax increases since 2000. Cumulatively, the top 1 percent of earners have received 22 percent of all tax cuts during that period; the top 20 percent of earners (those earning more than $111,000) have received 65 percent of tax cuts.

Despite the depressing overall picture, I found one part of the report to be encouraging: It shows that raising taxes on the rich — to combat the extreme current level of inequality — really is possible. President Barack Obama did so in his second term, reversing most of George W. Bush’s tax cuts on the top 1 percent. But then Trump won the White House, the Republicans kept control of Congress and they went even further in cutting high-end taxes than Bush had.

Elections have consequences. And on taxes, as on so many other subjects, our two political parties have fundamentally different positions.

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