Trump Appears To Claim Middle Class Tax Cut Will Be ‘Put In’ Without Congress, ‘We’ll Do The Vote Later’
As the 2018 midterm elections approach, Donald Trump has claimed to have a new plan to reduce taxes on the American middle class. That tax cut would be in place before November 1 — even though any such tax cut would require a congressional vote, and Congress is out of session until the week after the November 6 vote, according to a House of Representatives official calendar.
As Inquisitr reported on Monday, congressional leaders from Trump’s own party were left puzzled and confused by Trump’s tax cut claims, both about the details of the plan — none of which were stated by Trump except that the cut would be “about 10 percent” — and by Trump’s claim that the supposed tax cut would be in place before the midterm elections.
But in an exchange with reporters on Monday, Trump appeared to say that he could put the tax cut in place prior to a congressional vote — but without using an executive order, saying without explanation, “We’ll do the vote later,” according to an account by the business magazine Fortune.
“Are you signing an executive order for that?” a reporter asked Trump, referring to the alleged tax cut.
“No. No. No. I’m going through Congress,” Trump replied.
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 22, 2018
When a reporter pointed out that “Congress isn’t in session, though,” Trump replied, according to CNN, “We won’t have time to do the vote. We’ll do the vote later.”
Republicans, led by Trump, passed a sweeping tax cut bill in December of last year, but the process required nearly two months of negotiations and debate in Congress, according to Fortune. Studies have shown that a disproportionate share of the tax cuts in that bill went to the wealthiest American taxpayers. In fact, according to a report by Vox.com about 20 percent of the tax cut package benefits the top one percent of American income earners.
Trump’s claim that he will now push through a tax cut specifically for the middle class, a claim called “dubious” by the CNBC business news network, appears to be an admission that the 2017 tax cuts were indeed targeted overwhelmingly to benefit the richest Americans, the Fortune report said.
An internal Republican party poll reported by Bloomberg News last month revealed that Republican believe they have “lost the messaging” on the 2017 tax cuts, with 61 percent of Americans in the GOP’s own poll saying that the tax cut benefits “large corporations and rich Americans” rather than “middle-class families.”
