Republicans finally released a full working draft of their mammoth tax reform plan on Thursday. The 400-page Tax Cuts and Jobs Act doesn’t deliver the full Christmas list of tax priorities the White House requested in April, but it’s still a massive reorganization of the tax code that includes huge cuts to corporate and income taxes. But now that the bill is out in the open, Republicans face their biggest challenge: trying to control the narrative with a strong message of cuts and growth against a maelstrom of Democratic criticism.
GOP House leaders kicked that effort off Thursday morning, revealing the plan in front of a group of families and small business owners.
“You are who this is all about,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said. “This plan is for the middle-class families in this country who deserve a break. It is for all the families that are living paycheck to paycheck who just keep getting squeezed.”
Ryan and Ways and Means chairman Kevin Brady trumpeted the benefits their plan would offer such people: an increased standard deduction, an expanded child tax credit, lower income taxes, and an overall simpler filing experience. Republicans repeatedly said that the median American family would receive an annual tax cut exceeding $1,000.
At the same time, Republicans emphasized that the other pillar of their plan—slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent—would pay dividends for the middle class too.
“We’re going to make the economy boom for the average family of four,” Rep. Susan McMorris said.
But the plan faces a daunting gantlet in both houses of Congress, with Democrats going on an all-out attack against a bill they say enriches the wealthy at the expense of the middle class.
Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday, minority leader Chuck Schumer panned the bill as “increases on the middle class, breaks for the wealthy, big corporations getting a huge tax break with no guarantee and very little likelihood that they will use the money to create jobs.”
Democrats are also keying in on other vulnerable facets of the plan, such as certain popular deductions that Republicans are eliminating to minimize the damage to the deficit.
“To pay for all the tax giveaways in their bill, the Republicans are likely to make it worse for the middle class, not help them but hurt them,” Schumer said. “Slashing state and local deductibility, a bedrock middle-class and upper-middle-class tax deduction, would hurt so many middle-class taxpayers.”
Many Democrats have been less reserved in their attacks on the bill. Sens. Kamala Harris, Robert Casey, and Jeff Merkley have each claimed on Twitter that the GOP plan would raise taxes on families earning less than $86,000 a year, for which the Washington Post fact checker awarded them Four Pinnochios. “Most families in that income range would get a tax cut,” the fact checker wrote. “Any Democrat who spread this claim should delete their tweets and make clear they were in error.”
