President Donald J. Trump ran for office touting a tax reform agenda that would significantly benefit the wealthy members of his Mar-a-Lago Club. With the legislation moving through both the House and the Senate, the president’s allies on Capitol Hill are set to oblige.
Although the president still refuses to release his own tax returns, both the House and Senate tax reform bills are tailored to save him enormous sums of money. The proposed Senate bill includes a massive corporate giveaway that could amount to $79 billion, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Meanwhile, the House-passed bill heavily favors the country’s top one percent, who, according to the Tax Policy Center, would reap many more benefits than middle-class Americans. Trump’s rhetoric today simply does not match the bill’s true intentions.
The House and Senate proposals would be devastating to communities of color. The gradual elimination of the Estate Tax, the elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax, the reduction in the tax rate for pass-through businesses, and massive cuts in the corporate income tax under the House bill would all contribute to an already staggering racial wealth gap.
{mosads}The Senate bill would similarly perpetuate an income gap for working families with children. According to a recent study by Demos, in 2013, the median white household possessed $13 in wealth for every $1 held by the median African American household and $10 in wealth for every $1 held by the median Latino household. We cannot afford to continue tolerating this crisis.
Even when congressional leadership and the administration pay lip service to racial and economic equity concerns, they miss the mark by a mile. Although doubling the standard deduction would benefit some African-American and Latino families, the size of that tax cut pales in comparison to tax cuts for the rich that are included in the proposals.
By one estimate, lower-income families would ultimately owe more in taxes under the House proposal than current law. Attempts to level the playing field by capping the Mortgage Interest Deduction at $500,000 is a positive step, but only if Congress invests the savings from that reform into affordable rental housing for low-income families. Communities of color should not have to fight for scraps.
Both proposals would also dramatically reduce the revenue collected by the federal government, and a new estimate by the Joint Committee on Taxation reveals that the Senate bill would add $1 trillion to the national deficit. Similarly, the Tax Policy Center projects that the House bill would shortchange federal coffers by far more than the $1.5 trillion over the course of a decade. When federal revenue is squeezed, domestic priorities like education and housing are among the first to experience cuts, hitting communities of color the hardest.
It is through the domestic discretionary budget that we can judge whether we, as a society, rise to the challenge of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s reminder that budgets are moral documents. The United States provides public housing and Housing Choice Vouchers for low-income families, builds community health clinics, supports low-income school districts, and remediates environmental contamination in low-income communities of color, all through domestic discretionary programs. These are all endeavors that address the present and historical inequities faced by communities of color in the United States.
Existing funding levels are already inadequate to meet the staggering need that flows from the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, the expropriation of indigenous lands, and the exploitation of immigrant workers. Further cuts, prompted both by the House and Senate tax reform proposals as well as the GOP agenda, would be a cruel abdication of our duty to remedy racial injustice. The willingness of some in Congress to sacrifice the Children’s Health Insurance Program at the altar of tax reform drives this point home.
As with the administration’s inhumane budget proposal, racial justice advocates must work tirelessly to block these so-called tax reform proposals. The future of good government and racial justice depend on stopping the implementation of these harmful policies.
Kristen Clarke is president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Thomas Silverstein is an associate counsel in the Fair Housing & Community Development Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.