The Tax Policy Center, a joint think tank between the arch-progressive Urban Institute and the Dem establishment Brookings Institution, was forced to retract a study critical of Trump’s new tax reform plan.
The liberal groups used incorrect and biased assumptions and analysis to falsely conclude that Trump’s tax plan would not benefit the middle class and working class. They argued, initially, that the tax plan would only benefit the “wealthy,” at the expense of everyone else – an old, and tired, line of attack.
The center Initially concluded that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s tax cuts would go to “top earners,” claiming that, “The largest cuts in terms of dollars and as a percentage of after-tax income would accrue to higher-income households.”
Their fraudulent study continued, “however, not all taxpayers would receive a tax cut under this proposal—at least 12 percent of taxpayers would pay higher taxes under the proposal in 2018 and at least 28 percent of taxpayers would pay more in 2027,” the retracted report had said.
Following its initial release, the think tank was forced to make an embarrassing wholesale retraction of the entire report – urging news outlets to disregard the study, and wait for a new and correct analysis.
“Tax Policy Center staff found an error in the preliminary distributional analysis of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) that we released today,” the liberal organization admitted. “We are in the process of revising our analysis and will release a corrected version as soon as possible… We urge users to refrain from referring to the incorrect figures. We regret this error.”
Chris Edwards, a tax policy expert at the Libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, said that the economists of all the political stripes make errors on the complex computer models, but the problems at the Tax Policy Center are more severe.
“The real issue is that the Tax Policy Center tilts to the left in the assumptions it uses in simulations of tax plans, and in the way it presents findings,” Edwards said. “The Tax Policy Center undercounts the dynamic effects of economic growth from tax reform, and it presents study results in ways that appear to show high-earners do the best under Republican tax reform plans.”
The White House also says that the Tax Policy Center’s analysis of who wins and who loses under the plan is pathetically incomplete and that the study doesn’t take economic growth factors such as the job creation and wages into its account.
The White House instead points to a Tax Foundation study, which found that the tax proposal would increase GDP by 3.9%, create 975,000 full-time jobs, and lift after-tax incomes by 4.4% in the long run.
