Correcting Senator Crapo on the Expiring Trump Tax Law

Americans for Tax Fairness sets straight some of Senator Crapo’s most glaring misstatements

Senate Finance Committee ranking member Mike Crapo (R-ID) recently published an op-ed challenging the stance of Kamala Harris on the expiring parts of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law. It contained many errors and misleading statements both about Harris’s position on the law and about the law itself. ATF here sets straight some of Senator Crapo’s most glaring misstatements.

Claim 1: “If the TCJA expires next year, the Tax Foundation estimates that a single mother of one making $30,000 per year will pay more than $1,000 in higher taxes.”

FACT: This claim is based entirely on the false presumption that Harris would let the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) in the Trump tax law expire. Yet she has repeatedly said she would not let any part of the law expire that would adversely impact families with under $400,000 of income–every family receiving the CTC has lower income than that. Moreover, Harris supports increasing the CTC to $3,000 per-child, a policy that Senator Crapo has voted against numerous times. Beyond the CTC, this hypothetical single mother would derive no benefit from extension of the Trump tax law.

Claim 2: “A family of four making a median household income of $75,000 is estimated to face a tax increase of more than $1,500.”

FACT: This again is based on the false idea that Harris will let any part of the Trump law expire that hurts middle-income families. Yet even if the entire law expired but Harris was able to increase the CTC to $3,000 per child, as she has proposed, that hypothetical family would pay $2,500 less in taxes than what Senator Crapo is offering them. 

Claim 3: “Despite Democrats’ continued mischaracterizations, the TCJA provided a tax break to 80% of people, and middle-class taxpayers received the largest proportional benefit of the cuts.”

FACT: Every creditable distributional analysis of the Trump tax law – including from the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), and the Tax Policy Center (TPC) – has determined that a disproportionate amount of the benefit goes to high-income households and foreign investors. For example, TPC estimates that next year the highest-income 1% of households will on average get a tax cut of over $60,000, while a family in the middle of the income range will get an average tax cut of less than three dollars a day.

Claim 4: “Critics have claimed that the TCJA created loopholes for the top 1%…”

FACT: The TCJA created multiple loopholes for the top 1%, starting with the two-fifths cut in the corporate tax rate that overwhelmingly benefitted the top 1%, who own over half of all corporate stock. Other TCJA breaks for the wealthy include the pass-through loophole (Section 199A), the lower top tax rate, the weakened Alternative Minimum Tax and estate tax, and the creation of so-called opportunity zones. 

Claim 5: “Unless Democrats join Republicans in extending these popular provisions, people will face a more than $4 trillion tax hike in 2026, the largest in U.S. history.”

FACT: Congressional Republicans wrote the tax bill in 2017 specifically to ensure that the corporate tax cuts are permanent, but any tax cuts for individuals would expire in 2025. This accounting allowed them to hide the cost of the bill. If the TCJA is allowed to expire, individual tax rates will go up for the wealthiest who had been receiving tax cuts. Senator Crapo and other Congressional Republicans continue to insist they won’t maintain tax cuts for working families unless the very wealthy get cuts as well.