GOP ‘Project 2025’ Would Move Tax Policy In Exactly the Wrong Direction

Campaign talk is cheap, but a dangerous and detailed written plan like “Project 2025” demands our close attention.

By William Rice

Politics often focuses on personalities, but what matters most are the policies the people we elect to office plan to implement. Politicians come and go, while laws can last a long time and have a deep impact on our daily lives.

An organization with deep ties to the Republican Party and scores of former and likely future members of a GOP presidential administration have put forward a detailed blueprint for what they’d do if given power next year. Called “Project 2025”, its radical plans for rejecting core American beliefs and overturning well-settled practices include some of the most damaging tax proposals ever collected in one place.

Project 2025 has both specific and broad tax goals—and both are bad for working families and the general health of our country, while being very good for the selfish interests of rich households and big corporations. 

The plan’s specific goals include: 

• Cutting the top tax rate paid by the highest-income households, couples making nearly $400,000 a year or more. 

• For the wealthiest investors: 

  • Cutting by a full quarter—from 20% to 15%—the tax rate paid on their main sources of income.

  • Lowering their taxes even more by a bookkeeping change in how their investments are valued. 

  • Eliminating a tax that pays for healthcare and is meant to substitute for payroll taxes, from which investors are entirely exempt.

• For corporations: 

  • Cutting the corporate tax rate to 18%. This would be the second rate cut given to corporations in the past eight years and would make the rate about half what it was as recently as 2017.  

  • Allowing companies to reduce their taxes by immediately deducting the cost of big-ticket purchases like cars and machinery that they now have to write off over time to reflect their ongoing value.  

  • Eliminating a tax meant to curb tax dodging by corporations who shift American profits offshore. 

All these proposed handouts to the already rich and powerful of course move tax policy in exactly the wrong direction. High-income households, wealthy investors and big corporations are already flourishing, thanks in part to a tax code molded for their benefit. Rather than receiving even more tax handouts, all these groups should be paying a fairer share of taxes, raising revenue we can use to lower costs and increase opportunities for all the working families falling behind. 

That means, among other reforms, the top tax rate on the highest incomes should be allowed to return to the rate it was before the Trump-GOP tax law reduced it in 2018; the wealthiest investors should pay at least the same rate on their passive income as workers do on their wages—not enjoy a huge tax discount as they do now; and corporations rolling in profits should contribute more, not less, to the nation that makes their success possible. 

It would seem impossible, but the broader tax goals of Project 2025 are even worse than its specific recommendations. These goals include completely replacing the income tax with a national sales tax of the type that would represent a huge tax cut for the rich while increasing expenses for working families; forbidding majorities in Congress from implementing necessary tax reforms and allowing political minorities to protect loopholes and special breaks by requiring an anti-democratic “super majority” to fix our tax laws; and promoting, instead of trying to prevent, multinational corporations from using overseas accounting maneuvers to dodge paying their fair share to the U.S. 

Project 2025 would even replace career civil servants at the top of IRS management with political hacks whose goals would undoubtedly include shielding their rich and corporate tax-cheating friends from having to pay what they owe. Ever since President Biden and Congressional Democrats reversed decades of Republican budget cuts by restoring adequate funding for the IRS, the GOP has sought to reverse this funding and end the agency’s successful work chasing down rich tax evaders.  

Campaign talk is cheap, but a detailed written plan like “Project 2025” demands our close attention. It demonstrates once again that the leaders of the GOP are completely disconnected from the needs and concerns of ordinary Americans, focused instead on increasing the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful. We would be well advised to listen when they tell us what they want to do.