Tiny, I certainly did not try to cherry pick an article with statistics that supported my statements. I don't disagree that CNN can certainly be biased.
There are many ways to look at the impact of the tax reform. When you use percentages in the way your cited article did, it does not mention the actual dollars saved by those with lower incomes compared to higher incomes. Saving 13.5% on taxes owed on $20-30,000 will amount to a lot less than saving 5.9% on taxes owed by those making over $1 million.
As I said, every article I've read on the subject states that lower income families will see less of a percentage increase in their income than those at higher level of income. Here is such an article and please read the first 4 paragraphs under "V. Distribution", with emphasis on paragraphs 3 and 4.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content...aper_final.pdf
Originally Posted by SpeedRacerXXX
SpeedRacer, The Brookings Institute is to the left what the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute is to the right. It's biased.
In what you pointed me toward, they're cherry picking by looking at the bottom quintile (bottom 20%) of taxpayers. This is going to include a lot of students, housewives with part time jobs, as well as people who just get paid a lot less than they probably should. They pay very little tax. And as such they didn't get much of a tax cut.
That said, what I wrote is not inconsistent with the paragraphs you pointed me towards.
My first link, shows federal taxes decrease from an average of a 13.5% cut for people making $20,000 to $30,000 per year, down to a 5.9% cut for people making over $1,000,000 per year. Yes, they do show people making less than $10,000 as only receiving a 5.6% cut. And they also don't show any cut for people making between $10,000 and $20,000 per year, because that group was receiving money back from the federal government before the tax cut, and a little more money back after the tax cut.
My second link shows the single filers got no cut on their first $9525 in income and married filers got no cut on the first $19,050.
In other words, what your source is saying is that people who essentially paid no tax didn't get a tax cut. If you look at the middle class and upper income earners, the argument that this was a regressive tax cut doesn't wash, at all. Yes, if you're talking in dollar terms, the rich saved more. What do you expect in a country with the most progressive tax system in the developed world, where the top 1% pay 40% of the income tax and the top 10% pay 70%?
The other point in the 3rd or 4th paragraph was that people making over $1 million per year benefited most from the tax cuts for pass through entities. Absolutely true. But how many of them actually got significant benefit from that? The only people who benefited own companies with either huge depreciation compared to income (like Donald Trump) or very large labor expenses as a % of income. That's the way the the law was written. That's again why I say this was a sop to certain special interests, not "the rich."
Please note that my first source, the Joint Committee on Taxation, presumably is not biased and was quoted in the CNN article. The second source, I have no idea, but you could get the same information from IRS tax tables.
