This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Donald Trump’s top advisers on Sunday insisted his proposed tax plan would not cut taxes disproportionately for the rich – two days after the release of an early nonpartisan analysis that says it will.

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The director of the White House Office of Management and Budget said anyone who claimed to predict the effects of the plan was “simply lying”.

This week, the White House and congressional Republicans released the broad strokes of a plan that would cut corporate tax rates from 35% to 20%, reduce the number of personal income tax brackets and boost the standard deduction.

On Friday, the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution released an analysis that found the plan would deliver 50% of its total tax benefit to taxpayers in the top 1%, those with incomes above $730,000 a year.

On Sunday, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney told CNN’s State of the Union it was too early to gauge such figures because the plan left out for now many crucial details, such as which income levels the new tax brackets would apply to.

“In fact, I don’t think anybody can,” Mulvaney said. “And anybody who says they can is simply lying to you. It is impossible to sit down and say, ‘This will be the impact on this wage earner or this family at this particular time.’”

That didn’t stop Trump from doing just that when pitching the plan in a speech in Indiana this week. In his remarks, Trump pointed to a number of locals, including Jonathan Blanton, an industrial janitor from Greentown who earns a combined $90,000 a year with his wife.

“Under our tax plan they would have saved more than $1,000 and it could be substantially more,” Trump said. “And that’s just on federal taxes.”

Trump has also insisted that the plan would not reduce his own tax bills, telling supporters: “It’s not good for me. Believe me.”

Little is known about what tax Trump does pay as, breaking with 40 years of precedent for candidates for president, he has not released his tax returns.

The new tax plan includes a number of provisions that favor the rich, including cutting the top income tax rate, getting rid of the alternative minimum tax and eliminating the federal estate tax. Under current law, the first $11m of an estate is exempt for a married couple, meaning only the wealthiest Americans pay it.

Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that Trump’s goal was to boost jobs and lower the tax burden for the middle class.

“The president has been very clear,” he said. “And I’ve been clear from the beginning. Our objective is not to create tax cuts for the wealthy. Our objective is about creating middle-income tax cuts.”

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On ABC’s This Week, Mnuchin was asked if he could guarantee Trump would not get a tax cut under his plan.

“Again, as I’ve said all along, the objective of the president is that rich people don’t get tax cuts,” Mnuchin said. “And we’re perfectly comfortable, as we go through this process, we’ll explain to the American public how that works.”

The Tax Policy Center and Brookings found that under the plan, the after-tax incomes of the wealthiest Americans would increase by 8.5% next year. For other taxpayers, the benefits would be far more modest or nonexistent, the report said. Taxpayers in the bottom 95% would see cuts averaging 1.2% of after-tax income or less.

About 12% of taxpayers would face a tax increase, of $1,800 on average. That would include more than one-third of taxpayers earning between about $150,000 and $300,000, mostly because of the elimination of many itemized deductions.

By 2027, taxes would increase for about a quarter of Americans, including nearly 30% of those earning about $50,000 to $150,000 a year, and 60% of people making $150,000 to $300,000, according to the study.

