In a letter to congressional leaders Tuesday, unions including the United Auto Workers, the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, the Screen Actors Guild and the National Education Association joined dozens of progressive groups in blasting Trump’s cuts as unfairly designed and fiscally irresponsible.
Trump’s tax law, known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), “made massive and permanent cuts to corporate taxes and temporary cuts to individual and estate taxes that have largely benefitted the wealthy and eroded tax revenues,” the unions wrote to congressional leadership and the heads of the top tax-writing committees.
With individual provisions in the law set to expire in 2025, the 2024 election will determine whether they are renewed, modified or ditched altogether. Extending the individual cuts will cost $3.3 trillion through 2035, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.
But the unions and progressive groups want to push beyond that will-they-won’t-they framework and overhaul the tax code.
“Tax reform must result in a more progressive tax code that asks higher-income and higher-wealth households, corporations, and Wall Street to pay a greater share of their income in tax than they would in the absence of the TCJA,” they said.
Findings Congressional Research Service (CRS) that “the individual income tax cut largely went to higher-income individuals” substantiate the union claims.
While the TCJA decreased the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent, it did not lead to higher real wages for workers, which lagged behind the overall growth in labor compensation in 2018.
“This … indicates that ordinary workers had very little growth in wage rates,” the CRS determined.
The Hill’s Tobias Burns has more here.
