House Ways and Means Committee chairman Kevin Brady guaranteed Monday that the Republican tax plan would improve the life of every U.S. taxpayer, and rejected criticism that the newly-released framework doesn’t clearly spell out relief for low-income families.
“I guarantee you we are going to improve the lives of every American, by driving down taxes and increasing the paychecks,” Brady told reporters at the Capitol Monday, after being asked if he could guarantee that no families would face tax hikes in the plan.
Brady, a Texan whose committee will write the tax legislation based on the framework President Trump and Republicans introduced last week, was in part responding to an analysis produced Friday by the Tax Policy Center that found that the framework could result in tax hikes for taxpayers all over the income spectrum. Democrats seized on that finding to attack the GOP plan, as did Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Brady said that he was “disappointed” in the outside think tank’s report, which he said “drew conclusions with absolutely no facts.”
“I will guarantee we are going to work hard to lower taxes on every American, increase their paychecks, and dramatically simplify the code for them,” he said.
The GOP could claim that the tax plan benefits families even if it doesn’t provide a direct tax cut. For instance, they could maintain that the benefits of economic growth would flow to those families, or that they would benefit through easier tax filing.
Last week, White House National Economic Council director Gary Cohn shied away from issuing guarantees related to the middle class.
“Remember, we have 50 states, we have counties, we have cities, we have long-term capital gains, we have short-term capital gains — we have all different types of structures in the tax code,” Cohn said at a White House press briefing. “I’ll guarantee you, you could find someone in this country — maybe one person — who, their taxes may not go down.”
