While celebrating the passage of the GOP's tax bill, President Donald Trump admitted that tax cuts for businesses were the driving factor behind the bill his party sold as one meant to help the middle class.
"The plan also lowers the taxes on American businesses from 35 percent all the way down to 21 percent," the president said during a press conference Wednesday. "That's probably the biggest factor in this plan."
President Trump says GOP tax plan will lower tax on businesses: “That’s probably the biggest factor in this plan.” pic.twitter.com/ntTtnnD55b
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) December 20, 2017
He went on to claim that the plan "is really, above all else, a jobs bill," echoing the faulty logic of trickle-down economics. For conservative proponents of this bill and many other plans like it, wealth will "trickle down" from wealthy CEOs to middle and lower class employees because, if provided a stimulus like a massive tax break, they will use their money to create jobs. But former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and many others have have said that plans based in this logic never work as intended, and executives end up pocketing the money supposedly meant to boost the middle class' spending power.
As The Washington Post noted, Trump's admission offers proof that the GOP "deceptively sold" the bill as one meant for the middle class. The White House's own Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the bill's focus was "primarily, and priority number one, is middle-class Americans," and Republican leaders echoed that claim.
