Project 2025 will radically revise taxes. You're not going to like it

It’s not surprising that the 900+ pages of Project 2025, the extremist government blueprint cooked up by Donald Trump’s allies at The Heritage Foundation, include changes to the tax system. Taxes are always high on the list of Republican concerns. During Trump’s time in the White House, his biggest priority was a huge tax cut for corporations and billionaires that Republicans raced to pass in 2017, mere months after Trump sat down in the Oval Office.  Republicans are now trying to extend that tax cut, at a cost of adding $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. But the Project 2025 plan goes much further than simply extending these cuts. Trump's deceptive “no tax on tips” scheme isn't in there. Neither is replacing the income tax with an all-tariff system, as Trump has proposed. That idea is “dangerously foolish,” would generate massive economic disruption including a tidal wave of inflation, and simply would not raise enough money, even with radical spending cuts. But what’s in the Project 2025 plan is plenty bad enough—it’s a plan designed to lift the tax burden from the wealthy, and land it on the backs of working-class Americans. As CBS News reports, the proposed tax changes in Project 2025 are aimed at one of the parts of the U.S. income tax system most hated by conservatives: progressive tax brackets. The brackets recognize that wealthy Americans are better able to pay taxes, that rich people derive more benefits from the nation’s infrastructure and investments, and working- class Americans see a higher percentage of their income go to regressive sales taxes and fees. For decades, Republicans have proposed schemes that would replace the income tax system with a sales tax system or with a flat tax plan that would have everyone paying the same rate, regardless of income.  The Project 2025 plan doesn’t quite get there, but it’s still pretty bad. The proposal would take the existing tax brackets (10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35% and 37%) and cut them to just two brackets (15% and 30%). The plan maintains this would make the tax system simpler and easier to understand. Maybe. But, as Brendan Duke, senior director for economic policy at the Center for American Progress, made clear to CBS News, what it would certainly do is raise taxes for most Americans in order to give millionaires and billionaires an enormous break. Under this plan, the wealthiest Americans would see their taxes cut by 7%. That’s much larger than even the cut they were given in 2017.  Meanwhile, everyone making under $168,000 would see a tax increase. Duke estimates that a middle-class family of four making $100,000 a year would pay $2,600 in additional federal income tax under Project 2025’s two-bracket plan. But if that family of four was making $5 million a year, they would get a tax cut of $325,000. This is the opposite of President Joe Biden's proposals, which would not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000. In fact, the majority of Biden’s plan counts on just allowing the 2017 tax breaks given to the wealthy to expire in 2025 as planned, rather than extending them as Republicans are now demanding. "[The Project 2025 tax plan] is a dramatic reform of how we fund our government, where we ask the wealthy to pitch in more than lower income families," Duke told CBS News. "This shifts taxes from the wealthy to the middle class, full stop." There are enough horrors in Project 2025 that this extraordinary reversal of the tax system has barely generated any reaction.  But it’s another reason why this nefarious plan for a second Trump term must generate a blue wave of resistance in November. Campaign Action