Most Americans dread the lead up to tax day for what it means for their pocketbooks. This year, a collection of cynical leftists hope to use tax day to convince Americans of a fiction: that repealing last year’s tax reform will cut their taxes.
Aiming to organize tax day protests across the country, Tax March claims that last year’s tax reform raised taxes “for 92 million middle-class families.” This is a lie, and their preferred remedy of repealing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will produce exactly the result they claim justifies their opposition to it.
The tiny sliver of truth used to concoct the false middle-class tax hike claim is the fact that parliamentary procedures meant that the only way to secure enough votes to pass the tax reform bill was for the individual rate reductions to expire after 10 years. This means that 2027 will bring about a return to the tax rates that existed prior to TCJA. That’s assuming that they aren’t first extended, for which there will be considerable political pressure.
To claim that a temporary tax cut is actually a tax hike because rates will eventually return to their previous levels is utterly disingenuous.
If Tax March and Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer who make common cause with it actually cared about the fact that rates will return to their old levels in 2027 then they would propose making the new rates permanent. Instead, they want to repeal TCJA.
Take a moment to consider the sheer outrageousness of their position. In response to the pain of rate cuts expiring in 2027, Tax March wants to repeal the cuts entirely and make rates go up right now.
Unfortunately, thanks to a combination of dishonest media coverage and Republican political ineptitude, much of the public is still not well informed about how the tax changes will affect them according to a new study from the James Madison Institute. That’s a problem for Congressional Republicans, but also for tax reform supporters more generally. Still, public ignorance in no way excuses the lies of cynical demagogues aiming to dope voters into supporting tax hikes in the name of preventing them.
