Project 2025 would lower taxes for the rich and hike them for everyone else: analysis
Edward Carver, Common Dreams
August 28, 2024
The Center for American Progress on Tuesday released an analysis of the tax plans in Project 2025, a right-wing manifesto whose authors have close ties to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, showing that conservatives aim to lower taxes on corporations and the rich while raising them on working- and middle-class Americans.
The liberal research and advocacy group, which published the analysis as part of a series of in-depth articles on Project 2025, found that the right-wing plan would raise income taxes for the median family of four by about $3,000, cut taxes by at least $1.5 million for a household earning more than $10 million per year, on average, and cut the corporate tax rate to 18% from 21%, an already historically low rate instituted by Republicans in 2017.
The analysis, authored by Brendan Duke, a senior director of economic policy at CAP, shows that, of households with a married couple and two children, only those earning more than $170,000 per year would see a tax break under the Project 2025 plan.
"This analysis lays bare how the extreme, conservative Project 2025 plan is more of the same from conservative leaders—delivering handouts to the wealthy and corporations on the backs of working people," Kobie Christian, a spokesperson at Unrig Our Economy, an advocacy group, said in a statement.
The Project 2025 plan would consolidate seven tax brackets into just two—15% and 30%—on the grounds that it would "simplify" the tax code. However, CAP says that the existing number of tax brackets don't create any additional complexity and are easily dealt with by tax-filing software. Moreover, 70% of tax filers only deal with the two lowest tax brackets—10% and 12%—"so they effectively are already in a two-bracket system," Duke wrote.
CAP's findings about the impact of Project 2025's tax proposals on median earners are in keeping with those of the Democrats on the U.S. congressional Joint Economic Committee, who released a similar analysis earlier this month.
CAP included projections of the impact that Project 2025 would have on median income earners in each state and in the District of Columbia. Only in D.C., a high-earning area, were median earners projected to pay lower taxes under the right-wing plan; in all 50 states, their taxes went up.
It's unclear how popular the Project 2025 tax plans would be. Polling from Navigator Research, a progressive polling firm, in February showed that the vast majority of Americans favor increasing taxes on the rich and large corporations.
In addition to the immediate tax plans laid out above, Project 2025 also puts forth a long-term plan to replace all income taxes with a value-added tax—a flat, regressive proposal endorsed by some U.S. House Republicans. In addition to the injustice of such a plan, it may also be impractical. CAP found that it would require a value-added tax—similar to a sales tax—on everything, even essential items such as groceries and healthcare, of at least 45%, if it were to replace lost government revenues, and warned that this would cause inflation.
Project 2025 policy agenda is a 920-page manifesto written by right-wing groups including the Heritage Foundation. The plan has drawn intense media attention in recent months and has proven unpopular with the American public, leading Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, to repeatedly try to distance himself from it. However, 140 of his former administration officials helped create the manifesto.
Stephen Moore, a Heritage Foundation fellow and an outside economic adviser to Trump, helped write Project 2025 tax plan, according to Duke. Moore drew scrutiny this week for questioning the need for the child tax credit.
August 28, 2024
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The approach of Labor Day provides an appropriate time to reflect upon how Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans, if restored to power, will deal with the American labor movement.
Much of the evidence on this score is available in Project 2025, a 922-page public policy agenda, produced by the Heritage Foundation, for the first 180 days of a new Republican administration. Ever since 1981, this exceptionally wealthy, conservative, and powerful Washington think tank has been churning out blueprints for incoming Republican administrations. In fact, the Heritage Foundation performed the same service for the first Trump administration, bragging after only a year that the Trump White House had implemented nearly two-thirds of its proposals.
The Project 2025 policy agenda is far-ranging and includes many of the nostrums advanced by rightwing Republicans, including abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, slashing taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, further restricting abortion, increasing oil and gas production, maintaining a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family, and ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
But few of the project’s recommendations are as extreme as those dealing with America’s unions and the workers they represent.
For example, Project 2025 calls for banning public employee unions―unions representing teachers, librarians, firefighters, postal workers, police, clerks, trash collectors, and other public sector workers. As 32.5 percent of public sector employees belong to unions, they constitute the most highly unionized portion of the American workforce. Thus, the abolition of their unions would eliminate nearly half the union membership in the United States.
Nor would the rest of the nation’s union members, composed of private sector workers (only 6 percent of whom belong to unions), fare much better under this Heritage Foundation scheme. Most notably, Project 2025 advocates empowering the states to ban labor unions. Even partway through existing contracts, unions could be terminated. Furthermore, it would become illegal for employers to voluntarily recognize unions, while businesses would be allowed to create their own sham company unions.
Stripped of their access to union representation and the benefits unions bring, American workers would face still further losses of long-standing rights. Project 2025 calls for allowing the states to ignore the federal minimum wage and overtime pay laws, as well as for eliminating child labor rules that protect children from working in mines, meatpacking plants, and other hazardous workplaces. In these and other ways, Project 2025 promotes a return to the distant past, before the advent of legislation to prevent the abuse and exploitation of American workers.
Moreover, to safeguard the implementation of the Heritage Foundation’s rightwing agenda, Project 2025 champions firing as many as 50,000 federal government workers and replacing them with Trump loyalists.
Not surprisingly, once the extremist proposals in Project 2025 began to attract negative publicity, Donald Trump scrambled to distance himself from it. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” the Republican presidential candidate declared. “I have no idea who is behind it.”
Nevertheless, the connections between Trump and Project 2025 were hard to disguise. A CNN investigation revealed that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration helped write or had a hand in the Heritage Foundation game plan, including six of Trump’s former Cabinet secretaries. In fact, the person overseeing the entire project, Paul Gans, had served as a top official in the Trump White House.
Embarrassed by the growing controversy over Project 2025, key participants scurried for cover. Gans suddenly retired from the project in July, announcing that, given the election season, he would “direct all my efforts to winning bigly.”
Upon Gans’s departure, Kevin Roberts, the director of the Heritage Foundation and a leading Trump ally, took command of Project 2025. But Roberts, too, facing unpleasant public scrutiny and Democratic Party criticism, sought to downplay Project 2025’s connection to Trump and the Republican Party. This included postponing, until after the election, the publication of his forthcoming book, which contained a revealing foreword by J.D. Vance. In the foreword, the GOP vice-presidential candidate observed that “the Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”
Only two years before, Trump himself emphasized his staunch and continued partnership with the Heritage Foundation. Attending a foundation event, he remarked: “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America, and that’s coming.”
In addition, if anyone had any doubts about what Trump and his MAGA Republicans would do in the future about workers’ rights, they had only to look at the labor record of the first Trump administration. That record included sabotaging America’s labor unions, presiding over massive plant closures and job losses, blocking workers’ wage gains, and undermining the health and safety of American workers.
Consequently, the nation’s labor movement saw Trump’s past record and agenda for the future for what they were. In a statement issued on July 18, 2024, Liz Shuler, president of the national AFL-CIO, declared: “In his first term as president, Donald Trump was a disaster for workers and our unions.” Moreover, “the Trump Project 2025 Agenda lays out his plan to turbocharge his anti-worker policies, eliminate or control unions, and eviscerate labor laws and workers’ contracts.” Consequently, “a second Trump term would put everything we’ve fought for―good jobs, fair wages, health care, retirement security, worker security―on the chopping block.”
Indeed, Project 2025 provides a powerful reminder to the labor movement and its supporters of how important it is to defeat the election of Trump and his MAGA Republicans this November.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
The approach of Labor Day provides an appropriate time to reflect upon how Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans, if restored to power, will deal with the American labor movement.
Much of the evidence on this score is available in Project 2025, a 922-page public policy agenda, produced by the Heritage Foundation, for the first 180 days of a new Republican administration. Ever since 1981, this exceptionally wealthy, conservative, and powerful Washington think tank has been churning out blueprints for incoming Republican administrations. In fact, the Heritage Foundation performed the same service for the first Trump administration, bragging after only a year that the Trump White House had implemented nearly two-thirds of its proposals.
The Project 2025 policy agenda is far-ranging and includes many of the nostrums advanced by rightwing Republicans, including abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, slashing taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, further restricting abortion, increasing oil and gas production, maintaining a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family, and ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
But few of the project’s recommendations are as extreme as those dealing with America’s unions and the workers they represent.
For example, Project 2025 calls for banning public employee unions―unions representing teachers, librarians, firefighters, postal workers, police, clerks, trash collectors, and other public sector workers. As 32.5 percent of public sector employees belong to unions, they constitute the most highly unionized portion of the American workforce. Thus, the abolition of their unions would eliminate nearly half the union membership in the United States.
Nor would the rest of the nation’s union members, composed of private sector workers (only 6 percent of whom belong to unions), fare much better under this Heritage Foundation scheme. Most notably, Project 2025 advocates empowering the states to ban labor unions. Even partway through existing contracts, unions could be terminated. Furthermore, it would become illegal for employers to voluntarily recognize unions, while businesses would be allowed to create their own sham company unions.
Stripped of their access to union representation and the benefits unions bring, American workers would face still further losses of long-standing rights. Project 2025 calls for allowing the states to ignore the federal minimum wage and overtime pay laws, as well as for eliminating child labor rules that protect children from working in mines, meatpacking plants, and other hazardous workplaces. In these and other ways, Project 2025 promotes a return to the distant past, before the advent of legislation to prevent the abuse and exploitation of American workers.
Moreover, to safeguard the implementation of the Heritage Foundation’s rightwing agenda, Project 2025 champions firing as many as 50,000 federal government workers and replacing them with Trump loyalists.
Not surprisingly, once the extremist proposals in Project 2025 began to attract negative publicity, Donald Trump scrambled to distance himself from it. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” the Republican presidential candidate declared. “I have no idea who is behind it.”
Nevertheless, the connections between Trump and Project 2025 were hard to disguise. A CNN investigation revealed that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration helped write or had a hand in the Heritage Foundation game plan, including six of Trump’s former Cabinet secretaries. In fact, the person overseeing the entire project, Paul Gans, had served as a top official in the Trump White House.
Embarrassed by the growing controversy over Project 2025, key participants scurried for cover. Gans suddenly retired from the project in July, announcing that, given the election season, he would “direct all my efforts to winning bigly.”
Upon Gans’s departure, Kevin Roberts, the director of the Heritage Foundation and a leading Trump ally, took command of Project 2025. But Roberts, too, facing unpleasant public scrutiny and Democratic Party criticism, sought to downplay Project 2025’s connection to Trump and the Republican Party. This included postponing, until after the election, the publication of his forthcoming book, which contained a revealing foreword by J.D. Vance. In the foreword, the GOP vice-presidential candidate observed that “the Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”
Only two years before, Trump himself emphasized his staunch and continued partnership with the Heritage Foundation. Attending a foundation event, he remarked: “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America, and that’s coming.”
In addition, if anyone had any doubts about what Trump and his MAGA Republicans would do in the future about workers’ rights, they had only to look at the labor record of the first Trump administration. That record included sabotaging America’s labor unions, presiding over massive plant closures and job losses, blocking workers’ wage gains, and undermining the health and safety of American workers.
Consequently, the nation’s labor movement saw Trump’s past record and agenda for the future for what they were. In a statement issued on July 18, 2024, Liz Shuler, president of the national AFL-CIO, declared: “In his first term as president, Donald Trump was a disaster for workers and our unions.” Moreover, “the Trump Project 2025 Agenda lays out his plan to turbocharge his anti-worker policies, eliminate or control unions, and eviscerate labor laws and workers’ contracts.” Consequently, “a second Trump term would put everything we’ve fought for―good jobs, fair wages, health care, retirement security, worker security―on the chopping block.”
Indeed, Project 2025 provides a powerful reminder to the labor movement and its supporters of how important it is to defeat the election of Trump and his MAGA Republicans this November.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Lawrence S. WittnerWebsite
Lawrence ("Larry") Wittner was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, and attended Columbia College, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in history in 1967. Thereafter, he taught history at Hampton Institute, at Vassar College, at Japanese universities (under the Fulbright program), and at SUNY/Albany. In 2010, he retired as professor of history emeritus. A writer on peace and foreign policy issues, he is the author or editor of twelve books and hundreds of published articles and book reviews and a former president of the Peace History Society. Since 1961, he has been active in the peace, racial equality, and labor movements, and currently serves as a national board member of Peace Action (America's largest grassroots peace organization) and as executive secretary of the Albany County Central Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. On occasion, he helps to fan the flames of discontent by performing vocally and on the banjo with the Solidarity Singers. His latest book is Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual (University of Tennessee Press). More information about him can be found at his website: http://lawrenceswittner.com
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