Response to Comments The Tax Bill is Still Very Bad

There was some good pushback on yesterday’s article on taxes. But sorry, I’m still right.

Many people responded with generic low-tax anti-government positions. Fine. Let’s say the government is definitely bad and taxes are definitely too high. The current tax bill is still not the right way to do tax cuts.

Budget director Mick Mulvaney claims that the richest 20% of people pay 95% of income tax; the Wall Street Journal‘s numbers are a little lower, at 84%. Total income taxes are $1.8 trillion, so the poorest 80%’s share comes out to somewhere between 90 and 280 billion. This is around the same order of magnitude as the $100 billion in tax cuts in the current GOP bill. So it looks like one alternative to this bill, no more or less costly, would be to halve income taxes for the bottom 80% of the population, maybe anyone making less than $100,000.