The much-anticipated details of President Trump’s Tax plan, have finally begun to emerge.

On Thursday, the House GOP leaders released the ‘Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’, and word has already been leaked that President Trump wants the act finalized and on his desk on or before Christmas.

Is there something the public needs to know?

Here is the problem that I am having with that timeline. I do not believe that it is going to allow for proper perusal by the public as well as other interested stakeholders of this act. I also question the speed with which the GOP and President Trump seem to want to push through this piece of legislation through Congress.

To be fair, there has been one element of tax-reform that has been consistently emphasized since the days when President Trump was still a candidate. The number of federal income tax brackets could possibly be simplified from the seven that is the standard today.

Another element that is proposed via this tax plan in that from the seven tax brackets, we would move to only four: 12%, 25%,35%, 39.6%. These numbers feel strange to me, but we will all have to wait and see how practical these numbers are.

In September of this year, the president and his “Big Six” group of Republican tax strategists presented their latest version of their plan to try and overhaul the U.S tax system. This plan has faced many skeptics – including myself.

Again, I will clearly state that I am not an expert on U.S economic law and policies, but I find it strange when a tax plan that is supposed to help the middle class affects the tax breaks/credits that the same middle class is supposed to get.

I also find it strange that the GOP is trying to push this piece of legislation and yet certain aspects of funding for the insurance markets and the affordable care act are still up in the air.

I have no problem with an outdated system being re-worked to better fit the needs of the current and future generations, but I question this change when it would appear to benefit certain interest groups over others.

This latest tax plan, was said to be approximately nine pages long and was said to be longer than the total amount of bullet points that were distributed/released in April of this year, but in spite of its increase in volume, the fact remains that there was still so much missing from it, and this is another issue that I am having.

If you did not, at the very least, have a full working draft of the document, why present it?

Its almost as if they want to hurry and rush it through the Senate to save face with their supporters and contributors to hide the fact that they have yet to come up with a viable working solution for the Affordable Care Act.

Most of the deductions that we currently must deal with would be eliminated under this new plan. The exceptions to that elimination would be the charitable deduction and the mortgage interest rate deduction. The standard deduction would be increased while the personal exemption would be removed.

The GOP is pushing that last detail as a selling point of their tax plan, and their reasoning seems to be that their main selling point indicates that there will be a tax cut even for those that are at the lower spectrum of the income bracket.

That logic seems to be a little faulty to me as one business insider was quick to point out. The larger standard deduction works out to be roughly the same and could possibly be even worse for more than a few Americans.

The way I see it is that after they failed, quite spectacularly, to overhaul the healthcare system, they could be trying to use tax reform as a smokescreen to shift attention from their abject failure. This tax reform push could face the same outcome. Only time will tell.
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