Bangor Daily News: Wealth Hasn’t Trickled Down, It’s Surged Upward

Along the same lines, Republicans claim that reductions in the corporate tax rate will lead to higher wages for workers. Evidence suggests this isn’t true, either. After Reagan signed a tax overhaul in 1986 that reduced the country’s corporate tax rate from 46 percent to 34 percent, wages fell for four years.

Despite this data, Republicans in Congress last year pushed through a tax cut bill that includes big giveaways to the rich, like a doubling of the estate tax exemption, while ultimately hurting average Americans. Nearly a third of the tax cuts for Americans would go to the richest 1 percent in 2018. By 2027, that fraction would rise to nearly half, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. A third of the tax cuts would go to the bottom 80 percent of U.S. taxpayers in 2018 and that number would drop to 28 percent in 2027. Read more