The recklessness of this GOP tax scam knows no bounds. Republicans are willing to slash education, gut Medicare funding for seniors, make it more difficult to buy a home, and create a mammoth $2 trillion hole in the deficit all while giving another huge tax giveaway to Donald Trump, millionaires and billionaires, and corporations. Editorial boards and experts from around the country agree: this tax plan will hurt working families.

See coverage below:

The Los Angeles Times: Editorial: How big a tax cut for Trump?

“Actually, we know enough to say that he wouldn't have to pay more. Trump declared that he'd be a ‘big loser’ under the measure — that is, before he called on lawmakers to cut the top individual tax rate from 39.5 percent to 35 percent. But that's almost certainly false. Congress' own analysis of the tax bill's effects shows that it would deliver the biggest benefits to those on the penthouse floor of the U.S. economy.”

The Virginian-Pilot: Editorial: The false promise of GOP tax bills

“These measures do not represent broad-based relief for millions of working Americans struggling to get by amid stagnating wages and ever-increasing costs for health insurance and other necessities. Instead, as some Republicans admit, they are intended to provide greater benefit to those in the highest income brackets and to corporations. To argue otherwise, as some in the GOP are doing, is disingenuous, and it is dishonest.”

The Courier News: Editorial: No relief from GOP tax plan

“But it is abundantly clear that the primary motivation behind these reforms is to line the pockets of the super-wealthy; any supposed help for the middle class is a secondary concern at best. New Jerseyans will suffer more than most, and while Trump supporters here want to turn the blame on our own leadership, the fact is that we neither need nor deserve to be punished by Trump for daring to resist his universal wisdom.”

The New York Times: Editorial: A Tax-Cut Bill to Make Scrooge McDuck Proud

“What is this in service of? Republicans claim their big corporate tax cut will turbocharge the economy by encouraging businesses to invest, create jobs and give raises. Not even business chieftains believe this trickle-down argument. When an editor at The Wall Street Journal asked a gathering of chief executives this week if they would invest more if Congress enacted the Republican tax cut, few hands went up. Gary Cohn, President Trump’s top economic adviser, who was a featured guest on stage at the time, seemed befuddled. ‘Why aren’t the other hands up?’ he said. The administration’s cluelessness about how working people might see this cynical play for the rich was confirmed a day later when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and his wife, Louise Linton, were photographed with a sheet of freshly printed one-dollar bills with his signature, smirking like a couple of Disney villains.”

The News & Observer: Editorial: Student breaks at risk

“In the minds of many Americans, the fact that the Republican House tax reform plan – a foolish ploy on many fronts – contains provisions counting graduate school tuition waivers as taxable income might seem an esoteric bit of fine print. It’s not.”

The Charlotte Observer: GOP tax plan sparks déjà vu

“There are a number of major flaws with the House plan, and with the proposal the Senate will consider in coming days. But the defect that Democrats and Republicans alike should balk at is the $1 trillion to $2 trillion the bills would add to the nation’s debt over just the next 10 years. America’s debt passed the $20 trillion mark recently. It will grow to $30 trillion under current law over the next 10 years. The House and Senate tax reform plans would do nothing to slow that and in fact would accelerate it. Accounting gimmicks make the true ballooning of the debt likely to be much more.”

The Boston Globe: Editorial: Make sure to read the fine print on the GOP’s dubious tax reform plans

“The Senate bill is equally problematic. To comply with the Senate’s budgetary rules, that bill would make individual rate cuts (as well as small-business breaks) temporary, but corporate reductions permanent. That means a future Congress will face a choice: Reauthorize the individual tax cuts or see taxes increase on the middle class, as well as on others, in 2026. Further, the Senate bill heads back down the undermine-the-Affordable-Care-Act rabbit hole by repealing the requirement that people not otherwise covered purchase health insurance. And it would completely eliminate federal deductions for state and local taxes, which would hurt higher-tax blue states. Over time, the effect of that legislation would be to hike taxes on middle earners in order to bestow tax cuts that would benefit corporations and upper earners.”

The San Diego Union Tribune: This tax ‘reform’ would harm California

“The people who least need tax relief would instead save hundreds of billions of dollars through the elimination of the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax. This alone makes the GOP tax plans unacceptable. But here’s another reason the plans must be revised: Both would make California’s most pressing problem — its high cost of housing — even worse. Under current tax law, homeowners are allowed to deduct the interest they pay on mortgages up to $1 million if they itemize their federal returns. The House bill would reduce that to $500,000. Moreover, the House bill reduces to $10,000 the amount of property taxes that can be deducted, while the Senate bill eliminates the deduction altogether. Given that California has nearly half of U.S. mortgages of more than $500,000, any combination of these proposals would hammer millions of homeowners here.”

The Washington Post: GOP slips in a nasty poison pill to kill Obamacare

“If Republicans really believe that mandate repeal is good healthcare policy, they should seek to pass it on its own, with hearings, markups, and debate. But a fair process would only clarify further that the policy is ruinous. Republicans who in July recoiled at an attempt to ram through the Obamacare ‘skinny repeal’ have even less reason to vote for this drastic, ill-considered and last-minute attempt to sneak repeal into a tax bill.”

Minnesota Star Tribune: Editorial: GOP tax plan could have harmful side effects for health consumers, Midwest health providers

“Voters in Minnesota and elsewhere need to understand the implications of these under-the-radar changes as they weigh the legislative overhauls in the U.S. House and Senate. There’s more to this than what deductions and exemptions have been eliminated. The ACA changes could increase consumers’ health insurance costs or leave them going without coverage. The Medicare changes could threaten the economic vitality of hospitals and clinics — who are often large employers, particularly in rural areas.”

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Editorial: Ominous implications for Missouri, Illinois in tax-cut bills

“Republicans in Congress are hoping America’s average Joes and Janes won’t do the math to understand what a money-loser this turns out to be for them […] No one knows what the final GOP tax-cut bill will look like, or even if it will pass. The devil will be in the details, and in Missouri and Illinois, the devil is frightening.”

Akron Beacon Journal: Editorial: Senate Republicans put corporations first

“U.S. Sen. Rob Portman favors the swap, the mandate wiped out to ensure the permanent corporate tax cuts. What he and his fellow Republicans would make harder to claim is that this tax bill overall benefits the middle class. Before the provision surfaced to eliminate the individual mandate, the tax bill tilted heavily to the wealthy. […] As U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown emphasized during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Wednesday, end the individual mandate, and things get worse for many Ohioans.”