Hillary Clinton wants to raise taxes by $1.4 trillion while Donald Trump would cut them by $6.2 trillion. | AP Photo Trump's tax plan would shower the rich, Clinton's would soak them

When it comes to taxes, voters face a stark choice this November, a pair of new reports shows.

Hillary Clinton wants to raise taxes by $1.4 trillion while Donald Trump would cut them by $6.2 trillion.


The wealthy would be the big winners under his plan, the centrist Tax Policy Center said Tuesday, with the top 1 percent seeing an average tax cut of $215,000. The rich would bear nearly all of her tax increases, the group said, with the top 1 percent seeing their tax bills climbing by an average $118,000.

Trump would cut business taxes by more than $2.6 trillion; Clinton would increase them by $130 billion.

Her plan, with a mix of tax hikes on the rich and tax cuts for certain targeted groups further down the income ladder, would make the tax code a lot more complex. Trump's plan would simplify the code, the group said, though he would introduce new complications, especially when it comes to taxing small businesses.

"They really couldn't be more different," said Len Burman, head of the group. "In almost every meaningful respect, these plans are mirror images."

The new assessments come after both candidates have made substantial changes to their tax plans, and tangled over the proposals in recent debates.

Trump has almost completely rewritten his plan, making it much closer to one offered by House Republicans, while Clinton has offered a succession of new changes. Among them: a brand new proposal to double a child tax credit to $2,000 for children under the age of five, which the Tax Policy Center figures would cost $209 billion.

The Trump campaign denounced the study as "fraudulent."

Calling the Tax Policy Center "deeply biased," and accusing it of "gross malfeasance," Trump Policy Director Stephen Miller said in a statement: "The Trump plan is revenue neutral, massively cuts middle-class taxes and has huge childcare benefits for low- and middle-income families."

Clinton adviser Jacob Leibenluft said: "This report is further evidence of the clear choice for voters," saying the Democratic nominee would require "the wealthy, Wall Street and large corporations to pay their fair share."

The differences between the two plans begin with the winners and losers.

Though Trump accused Clinton in Sunday's debate of plotting to "massively" raise "everybody's taxes," the report shows that the top 1 percent would actually pay 92 percent of the tax increases she proposed. That would reduce their after-tax incomes by 5 percent.

She'd go even harder after the top 0.1 percent, where incomes begin at $3.7 million. They'd pay an additional $805,000 on average.

By contrast, though Trump has said his plan is focused on the middle class, the report shows he'd give the most to the wealthy. While the top 1 percent would receive an average tax cut of $215,000, the top 0.1 percent would pocket an additional $1.1 million.

People at every income level would see a tax cut under Trump's plan, the group said, with those in the middle of the income spectrum seeing an average $1,010 tax cut. Those at the bottom would see their taxes fall by $110.

Some people within those groups, such as single parents and families with multiple children, would see their taxes go up though because of Trump's plan to junk the head-of-household filing status as well as personal exemptions.

Clinton's plan would leave those in the bottom 80 percent of earners mostly unchanged. Under her plan, people in the middle one-fifth would see a $110 tax cut, the analysis shows, while those at the bottom would get an additional $100.

Trump's plan is much more focused on revamping the business tax code, promising to cut rates to 15 percent, from 35 percent, and allowing manufacturers to immediately write off the cost of their investments.

But his plan to cut taxes to 15 percent on so-called pass throughs (in which business owners pay taxes on their profits through their individual returns) as well as corporations — even as he charges a top individual rate of 33 percent — would create a strong incentive for the rich to dress themselves up as small businesses in order to tap the lower rate, the group said.

"The revised Trump plan does not specify any rules or enforcement mechanisms that might limit the number of employees who would redefine themselves as sole proprietorships or other pass-through businesses in order to benefit from the 15 percent business tax rate," the report said. "We have assumed that eventually half (50 percent) of high-wage workers would become pass-through entities."

Clinton has a far more limited business tax plan that focuses mostly on shutting down ways multinational corporations can avoid paying U.S. taxes. She wants to crack down on "inversions," where companies shift their headquarters abroad in order to duck the tax man, and so-called earnings stripping. She would impose an "exit tax" on businesses that move abroad. Those changes would generate $100 billion, the Tax Policy Center.

Her plans actually would have a bigger direct effect on the real estate industry than Trump's, thanks to her proposal to crimp like-kind exchanges. That allows real estate developers to defer capital gains taxes, sometimes for decades, by trading properties. Clinton would only allow the postponement of $1 million in gains annually.

Clinton's tax plans would technically reduce the debt by $1.6 trillion over the decade, once reduced interest payments on the debt are included. But she wants to use that money to pay for a host of new spending initiatives, which means her plans overall would be a wash for the budget, said Burman.

"Clinton's proposal is clearly designed not to have much effect on the budget," he said. "It's a net tax increase, but I think she's earmarked all of that to pay for new spending, so she's been criticized by budget hawks as not doing anything to get us off our unsustainable fiscal path but at least she doesn't make things worse."

By contrast, Trump's plan would balloon the debt by $7.2 trillion, once increased interest payments are included. Trump has said he’d offset the cost of his plan with spending reductions though he hasn’t said how, and has ruled out cutting large chunks of the budget.

Clinton's plan is hardly what many tax reformers had have in mind, the report shows. Her plans to create three new minimum taxes, for example, would make an already opaque code even more complex.

"Clinton's proposal is complicated, especially for individuals," Burman said. "Three new alternative minimum taxes will make it hard to figure out what their tax situation is."

The group did not do a so-called dynamic analysis, examining the plans' effects on the economy, though it predicted Trump's plan would hurt growth in the long term. That's because his run up in the debt would force the government to borrow more, which would push up interest rates. The group hopes to put out its economic analyses of the plans in the next couple days.

"We will put out those estimates as soon as we're sure they're right," he said.