Project 2025-CAP

The "CAP" in this post's Title stands for Center for American Progress. They undertook a series of articles highlighting specific aspects of this gargantuan fascist blueprint aka Project 2025. I am going to excerpt only one of the series, The Tax Plan, below, at least, for now.

August 27, 2024

Author Brendan Duke

Project 2025’s Tax Plan Would Raise Taxes on the Middle Class and Cut Taxes for the Wealthy

The far-right extremist playbook would immediately raise taxes for the middle class by thousands of dollars while also pushing for long-term changes that could raise taxes by $5,900.

This article is part of a series from the Center for American Progress exposing how the sweeping Project 2025 policy agenda would harm all Americans. This new authoritarian playbook, published by the Heritage Foundation, would destroy the 250-year-old system of checks and balances upon which U.S. democracy has relied and give far-right politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives.

For state-specific data on how much Project 2025 would raise taxes on families, see Appendix (at link).

Large majorities of Americans worry that the tax system is unfair, with the wealthy and corporations paying less than their fair share. Yet in the extremist Mandate for Leadership, dubbed “Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project,” far-right extremist plans are outlined that raise taxes on low- and middle-income households to finance tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations. Project 2025’s tax plan includes an “intermediate tax reform” that includes changes to tax brackets and corporate tax cuts that would shift the tax burden toward middle-income households. And the “fundamental tax reform” it proposes would replace all individual income and corporate taxes with consumption taxes.

Specifically, Project 2025’s tax reform plan would:

--Enact a two-income tax bracket system that would raise taxes by $3,000 for the median family of four—which makes about $110,000 a year—and raise taxes by $950 for the typical single-person household, which makes about $40,000 a year. (see Appendix for state-specific data)

--Provide an average $1.5–2.4 million tax cut for the 45,000 U.S. households making more than $10 million annually from the combination of the “two-bracket” system and cuts to taxes on the wealthy’s investment income.

--Cut the corporate tax rate to 18 percent, which amounts to a $24 billion tax cut for the Fortune 100.

--Replace all individual and corporate income taxes with a consumption tax in the long term. This could take the form of a value-added tax well above 45 percent, which would produce an enormous one-time burst of inflation and raise prices.

The shift toward a flat consumption tax while eliminating income taxes would lead to an average $5,900 tax increase for the middle 20 percent of households and an average $2 million tax cut for the top 0.1 percent.

Project 2025’s immediate tax reform is a $3,000 tax increase for the typical family of four

The centerpiece of Project 2025’s “intermediate tax reform” plan consolidates seven individual income tax brackets, ranging from 10 to 37 percent, to just two brackets: 15 percent and 30 percent.

Project 2025 says this is a way to “to simplify the tax code,” but the number of tax brackets is already one of the simplest parts of the tax code, especially since tax-filing software instantly calculates how much tax families owe for income in each bracket. Moreover, 70 percent of tax filers only have enough income to be in the first two brackets, so they effectively are already in a two-bracket system.

Project 2025’s new tax bracket system, however, represents an enormous shift of the tax burden from wealthy tax filers to middle-income tax filers. This is because the two current bottom brackets (10 percent and 12 percent) are lower than the 15 percent tax bracket proposed by Project 2025. This effectively raises the tax rate on a married couple’s income between about $30,000 and $120,000 and on a single filer’s income between about $15,000 and $60,000. Higher-income tax filers, on the other hand, would get a tax cut, as the proposed 30 percent tax bracket is lower than the current 32 percent, 35 percent, and 37 percent brackets that much of their income falls into.*

The end result of these changes would be a tax increase for middle-class households. The median family of four made about $110,000 in 2022 and would experience about a $3,000 tax increase from this change. They would experience a tax increase in all 50 states outside of Washington, D.C., where the median family of four—making $195,000 in income—would experience a tax cut. In addition, the median one-person household made about $40,000 in 2022 and would experience a $950 tax increase under the plan. They would also experience a tax increase in all 50 states, as well as Washington, D.C. (see Appendix)

Project 2025 also “eliminates most deductions, credits and exclusions.” The calculations above do not include the effects of removing these tax provisions since it is not known which ones Project 2025 would eliminate and many middle-income households do not use many of them, such as the mortgage interest deduction, since they take the standard deduction. If Project 2025 were to eliminate the child tax credit and earned income tax credit, the tax increases on low- and middle-income families would be even larger.

Project 2025 would cut taxes for households making more than $10 million by $1.5–2.4 million

Project 2025 takes further steps to cut taxes for the wealthy. It says “capital gains and qualified dividends should be taxed at 15 percent,” which is exclusively a tax cut for the less than 2 percent of households making more than $500,000 a year, since taxpayers making below that amount already pay a 0 or 15 percent tax rate on that income. Project 2025 would also eliminate the net investment income tax, which is a 3.8 percent tax on capital gains, dividends, and other investment income received by households making more than $200,000.

Combining the changes to tax brackets, the cut in the tax rate on capital gains and dividends for the wealthy, and the elimination of the net investment income tax, this would deliver an average tax cut of up to $2.4 million for the 45,000 households making more than $10 million annually. If Project 2025 were to eliminate all itemized deductions—including the charitable deduction—and the deduction for pass-through business income for this group, their average tax cut would still be $1.5 million.

Project 2025’s immediate tax plan is a large corporate tax cut

Project 2025 does not stop at cutting taxes for wealthy individuals; it also proposes an array of tax cuts for corporations. This starts by doubling down on the staggering 14 percentage-point cut in the corporate tax rate that the majority of congressional Republicans enacted in 2017 by further cutting the rate from 21 percent to 18 percent.

This would amount to a $24 billion tax cut for the Fortune 100, the 100 largest companies in America, based on CAP analysis of their latest financial statements. This includes:

--A $1.3 billion tax cut to the five largest U.S. oil companies: Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Marathon Petroleum/ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Valero Energy 

--A $1.6 billion tax cut to the five largest drug makers: Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, AbbVie, and Bristol Myers Squibb 

--A $2.1 billion tax cut to the five largest Wall Street banks: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs

--A $800 million tax cut to the five largest grocery companies: Kroger, Costco, Albertsons, Target, and Walmart

And Project 2025 would further cut taxes for corporations by repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax increases for corporations, including a 15 percent minimum corporate tax rate for the largest corporations and an excise tax on stock buyback.

There is even more of this article at the link here. 

And this link takes you to all of the articles in this Project 2025 series.

These guys have done some serious work here. I know that everyone is getting bombarded with solicitations for money, but consider tossing a few bucks to the Center for American Progress.