Washington Post Busts Biden’s False Claim Only the Rich Benefitted From Trump’s Tax Cuts

Washington Post is giving former Vice President Joe Biden four Pinocchios for his claim that President Trump’s tax cut exclusively helped rich people.

As Biden gave the first speech of his presidential campaign this week, he diminished its impact by asking his audience “Did you feel it? Did you get anything from it? Of course not. Of course not. All of it went to folks at the top and corporations.”

The first thing wrong with Biden’s claim is that he said the tax cut would be valued at $2 trillion while the estimated revenue loss is projected for closer to $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

The second thing, as WaPo points out, is that if Biden is saying that the wealthy and corporations don’t pay taxes, that ignores the fact that the wealthy pay a significant portion of the country’s income taxes. Ergo, a broad cut is going to benefit the wealthy more than the middle class, which has more people but less money to be collected per taxpayer.

“The top 20 percent of income earners paid 95.2 percent of individual income taxes in 2017,” Glenn Kessler writes, citing data from the Treasury Department. “The top 10 percent paid 81 percent. The top 0.1 percent paid an astonishing 24.1 percent of taxes.”

Kessler goes on to say that Biden’s statement is an unfair perspective on the tax cuts since Tax Policy Center data says 65 percent of taxpayers would get tax cuts, even if the top 1 percent would get 20.5 percent of those cuts. The argument put forth by Biden also misleads on the impact and timing of the individual rate cuts’ expiration, and doesn’t account for whether the cut is extended or allowed to expire in 2027.

“[Biden] asserts that no Americans but those at the top received any tax cut in 2018, which is clearly false,” Kessler says. “Most Americans received a tax cut. They may not have noticed it, but that’s no excuse for saying they never got one.”