Pro-tax millionaire Eric Schoenberg argued on Fox News that Donald Trump’s tax plan would disproportionately benefit affluent Americans like the President himself.
Mr Schoenberg is part of a group called Patriotic Millionaires that advocates having wealthy Americans play a larger proportionate share of taxes. The group opposes measures, like the elimination of the estate tax, that it argues will mostly return money to the highest earners.
An analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that the wealthiest one percent of Americans would reap about 50 per cent of the total benefit from the Republican tax plan. In an appearance on Fox News, Mr Schoenberg assailed an approach that he said chiefly sought to aid people in his income bracket.
“I live in New Jersey and I’m going to tell you that this is going to cut my tax bill in half," Mr Schoenberg said.
Challenged to back that up, Mr Schoenberg pointed to a few specific provisions. He noted that a sharp reduction in the top tax rate on “pass-through” income, which derives from businesses reported by individual owners, would benefit people like him.
“That’s what wealthy people get income from," he said.
In addition, the plan would do away with the estate tax, a levy on inheritance. Long loathed by conservatives and reviled as a “death tax”, the estate tax only applies to estates worth more millions of dollars. And the plan would eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax, Mr Schoenberg noted, which cost Mr Trump $31m in taxes in 2005.
“It’s going to save Donald Trump billions in taxes, it’s going to save [National Economic Council Director] Gary Cohn hundreds of millions in taxes”, Mr Schoenberg asserted. Multiple analyses have concluded Mr Trump could save in excess of $1billion under the plan.
