NEWS
Doak Creek
BY CAMILLA MORTENSEN
Native Plant Nursery
TRUMP’S TAX PLAN
We have a full selection of Native plants
Sen. Ron Wyden weighs in on a tax plan that robs the
middle class to pay the rich
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resident Donald Trump’s tax plan is not unlike his tweets: short, lacking depth
and full of bravado. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden doesn’t mince words when he talks
about the proposal. He calls it a scam and a “middle-class con job.”
The senator has been speaking out against the Trump tax overhaul at town halls
on a recent swing through Oregon.
The most recent framework for the Trump plan, posted on the White House website
Sept. 27, is essentially a bullet-point list kicking off with the words, “President Donald J.
Trump Puts Americans First in Tax Relief,” sounding more like a campaign slogan than a
plan.
According to Wyden, the earlier version of the plan released in the spring didn’t have
much more depth. In a recent phone call with Eugene Weekly, he reiterated a talking point
he has been using about the overhaul — that it is “shorter than a typical Fred Meyer re-
ceipt.”
The current version he says is a nine-page set of principles that includes four and a half
pages of white space.
Wyden says Trump makes a big deal on the White House website about an increase
in the standard deduction. The plan says (capital letters in the original) “TAX CUT For
WORKING AMERICANS: We are laying out a tax-relief framework that will unburden
America’s Middle Class.”
Wyden says, “By itself that sounds good,” but he adds that Trump giveth with one hand
and taketh away with the other, because the plan takes away the personal and dependent
exemptions. For example, he says, if you are a family in southwest Oregon — a married
couple and two kids — and you lose the $16,000 personal exemption, the $12,000 you gain
from the increase in the standard deduction in Trump’s plan still leaves you with a net loss.
“In terms of what’s on offer now, the middle class comes out behind,” he says.
The plan comes, Wyden says, at a particularly important time in the economy with in-
equality expanding. “We really have two tax systems.”
One he says is for the “nurse and the cop” for whom tax is compulsory and there are no
Caiman Island deals. The other is not compulsory, and it’s for the people Wyden calls the
“high flyers” who “can pretty much decide what they are going to pay and when they are
going to pay it.” That second group does well under the Trump proposal, he says. The first
group does not.
The plan also claims it will lower taxes on small businesses and slash the corporate rate
from 35 percent to 20 percent. Trump’s proposal creates a “new Grand Canyon-sized mega
loophole for the wealthy,” Wyden says, reiterating another of his town hall talking points.
The Trump administration is facing the challenge of writing actual legislation, not just a
framework, and getting it passed through both the House and Senate and their committees
in the less than one month left in the legislative calendar if the president wants to get his
tax relief in place for next year.
An Oct. 15 CBS Nation Tracker poll found that “58 percent of Americans think the cur-
rent reforms being discussed would favor the rich, while 18 percent think they would favor
the middle class.”
Trump has taken to Twitter to promote his tax plan, a strategy that didn’t prove useful
in pushing through his attempts to reform Obamacare. He tweeted on Oct. 16 that “The
Democrats only want to increase taxes and obstruct. That’s all they are good at!”
Wyden says Trump’s people are 10 months into their administration and “don’t have a
signature piece of legislation.” The senator says he can’t recall an administration this far in
that didn’t have that.
Now is the time, Wyden says, to push back on the tax plans “like we did on health care,
so people really understand what’s at stake.”
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eugeneweekly.com • October 19, 2017
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