How the GOP’s Tax Cuts Worsen Racial Wealth Gaps

FEATURING EMANUEL NIEVES – Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell recently reacted to news of the ballooning federal deficit that was created by tax giveaways to the rich and by higher military spending by saying that social safety net programs need to be cut. McConnell said, “It’s disappointing but it’s not a Republican problem,” even though it was Trump and the GOP that rammed through last year’s tax reform bill.

Critics of last year’s GOP tax cuts predicted that the reduced tax revenues would be offset by Republican-led cuts to social safety net programs. And indeed that is exactly what McConnell and his fellow Republicans are doing. McConnell said in an interview with Bloomberg, “The three big entitlement programs that are very popular, Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid, that’s 70 percent of what we spend every year.” The term “entitlement programs” is popular with conservatives to refer to earned benefits and social safety net program.

Meanwhile a new report has zeroed in on a little-acknowledged impact of the tax reform law – how tax cuts are disproportionately benefiting wealthy white Americans. In other words, the tax reform will only worsen the existing racial wealth gap in this country.

Read the report ‘Race, Wealth and Taxes: How the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Supercharges the Racial Wealth Divide’, HERE.

Emanuel Nieves, Senior Policy Manager at Prosperity Now. He also leads Prosperity Now’s work on predatory lending and coordinates the Assets Building Policy Network. He is the co-author of the new report, ‘Race, Wealth and Taxes: How the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Supercharges the Racial Wealth Divide’.

**This segment was originally broadcast on October, 18, 2018.