Dear Editor

In spite of what politicians would like the public to believe, the proposed legislation that is being touted as tax reform really is just a series of tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals who are already getting enough of a free ride, and it comes at the expense of the national debt and the American people. Reform is defined in the Oxford English dictionary as “making changes in something in order to improve it.” How is our country being improved by tax cuts to the wealthiest individuals and to corporate America when these cuts will conservatively result in a $2 trillion increase to the $20 trillion national debt over the next ten years and $1.5 trillion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over this same time frame?  It has been presented in the Senate that 200 tax loopholes cost the country $123 trillion annually. The drafters of this tax legislation claim these loopholes will be gone under the tax plan, but the end result is not reform,as the Tax Policy Center notes it will provide 53 percent of the benefits to the top one percent, who would see an average after tax income increase of 8.5 percent. The bottom 95 percent of the population can expect after tax income increases between .5 and 1.2 percent. I’ve heard that at worst this tax proposal will add much as $5 trillion to the national debt, with 80 percent of the tax cuts going to the top one percent of earners.  I don’t see anything in this bill that remotely looks like reform.

Ann Bley

Virgin Valley Action Group

Mesquite, NV