WASHINGTON — With the Senate likely to pass a budget resolution Thursday, Democratic senators unveiled a report Wednesday that showed President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet would reap huge financial gains if the estate tax is repealed under the GOP tax plan.
The president met with senators from both parties at the White House to discuss a bipartisan approach to tax reform separate from the Senate Republican proposal.
In order to rush the GOP tax plan through the Senate, Republicans want to vote on it as a budget reconciliation, which requires a simple majority of 51 votes. But in order for it to qualify as a budget reconciliation, a budget resolution outlining spending goals for the fiscal year needs to be passed first.
“Trump’s tax plan is simple: The rich get richer and everyone else gets left behind,” said Warren. According to the report by the left-leaning Center for American Progress, the president, his family and members of his cabinet could receive a combined $3.5 billion from the repeal of the estate tax, a tax on the transfer of property or wealth of a deceased person. It only kicks in on estates worth more than $5.5 million.
Tuesday night, Trump gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation, where he described the GOP tax plan as a “tax cut for everyday, working Americans.”
“You understand that lower taxes mean more jobs, bigger paychecks and stronger growth,” the president said at the conservative think tank. “And yes, we are ending the horrible and very unfair estate tax.”
Adam Michel, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said the tax was an “unnecessary burden on businesses and families” that slows economic growth hinders business because it is a tax on capital. The Farm Bureau, Family Business Coalition and the National Federation of Independent Business support the repeal of the tax.
Congress could get the go-ahead to move forward on tax reform legislation as early as Thursday, following the passage of a budget resolution for fiscal 2018. Debate on the resolution continued Wednesday in the Senate, and a vote in favor of the proposed budget is expected to narrowly pass Thursday.
At the White House, GOP and Democratic senators on the chamber’s tax writing committee joined the president for lunch, where Trump jokingly told reporters “we’ll have unanimous support for tax reform.”
“I have no doubt, right?” he said.
Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey was one of six Democrats at the lunch and said the president intends to have a big middle-class tax cut in the tax proposal. “He and his team were open to changes once they get to drafting the bill,” Casey said, but was discouraged that a GOP-controlled Congress would not allow debate on the plan.
Casey said he’d like to offer amendments to at least partially restore the $1 trillion cut in Medicaid and $473 billion cut in Medicare proposed in the budget resolution.