House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Recently revived longstanding Democratic criticism of the tax bill signed by President Donald Trump in 2017.
In a March 14 interview on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos Pelosi urged a possible future infrastructure bill. Pelosi said she wanted to be “fiscally sound” in putting such a bill together, contrasting with the 2017 Republican tax bill.
An infrastructure bill, she said, would be “job creation that creates revenue that goes back to the Treasury, as opposed to what the (Republicans) did with their tax fraud in 2017, where 83% of the benefits are top 1 % went to% and put our children in debt nearly $ 1.9 trillion. … So you should be the last to talk about what is too expensive for the American people if we can meet their needs. “
But Pelosi’s argument – that the GOP tax bill “gave 83% of the benefits to the top 1%” – has been criticized time and again over the past three years.
An analysis of the final draft of the tax law by the impartial Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution found that the tax law would deliver 82.8% of its benefits to the top 1% of the income spectrum by 2027.
In previous years, however, the distribution of benefits looked very different.
For example, according to the center’s analysis in 2018, the bill was forecast to deliver 20.5% of the benefits to the top 1% – far less than the 83% stated by Pelosi. And by 2025, the center predicted, 25.3% of benefits would go to the top 1%.
The main reason: By 2027, some key tax rules that benefit middle-income taxpayers will have expired unless Congress extends them. In addition, the new tax law has changed the way inflation is calculated in ways that will become less generous to taxpayers over time.
“How much of the benefit of the tax burden goes to the top 1% income bracket depends a lot on what year you are in,” Joseph Rosenberg, senior research associate at the Tax Policy Center, told PolitiFact in 2018.
In a query related to this article, Pelosi’s office did not dispute our previous analysis, but argued that the Republican focus on the richest 1% is in what parts of the tax cuts they wanted to make permanent.
“Republicans have chosen that the enduring legacy of their tax burden will benefit the richest 1%, rather than working families,” said Henry V. Connelly, director of communications for Pelosi. “This is a defining feature of the legislation as Republicans had a choice and decided to make other parts of the bill permanent, but not those that would benefit workers rather than corporations and the rich few.”
Our decision
Pelosi said the 2017 Republican Tax Bill “gave 83% of the benefits to the top 1%.”
It will do so in 2027, as several key middle income tax cuts have expired and the way inflation is calculated has changed. By 2025, however, the share of benefits in the top 1% is much lower at around 20% to 25%. Pelosi has focused on the impact of tax legislation through 2027 rather than the impact for nearly a decade up to then.
We rate the statement as half true.