Trump Signs Tax Cuts And Jobs Act In Oval Office Ceremony, Resolves Long-Standing Concern That Wealthiest Americans Were Insufficiently Wealthy

The Filing

WASHINGTON. Surrounded by congressional Republicans and a small assembly of advisers whose own personal tax situations had improved markedly overnight, President Donald Trump on Friday signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law, a $1.5 trillion measure that the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation independently projected would direct roughly 83 percent of its long-term benefits to the top 1 percent of households once its individual provisions expire in 2025.

The President called the legislation a Christmas gift for working Americans, then immediately departed for his private club at Mar-a-Lago, where new members were at that time paying a $200,000 initiation fee, and where, according to subsequent reporting, the President was overheard assuring fellow members over the holiday weekend that "you all just got a lot richer."

The new law permanently slashes the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, doubles the estate tax exemption to roughly $22 million per couple, caps the state and local tax deduction at $10,000 in a manner observers noted falls heaviest on residents of states the President lost, and introduces a new 20 percent pass-through deduction structured in a manner uniquely beneficial to commercial real estate entities resembling the President's own. Individual rate cuts, by contrast, are scheduled to phase out in 2025, at which point Joint Committee staff project that households earning under $75,000 will, in aggregate, owe more in federal income tax than they did before the law was passed.

"Believe me, this is not good for me," the President had repeatedly said of the bill in the months before its passage, a claim that the Tax Policy Center estimated would save him personally in the tens of millions of dollars annually, and which his accountants later quietly confirmed had also not been good for him in the sense of arithmetic.

Sources within the administration acknowledged that the law's signature feature, the corporate rate reduction, was made permanent because corporations had requested permanence, while the individual rate reduction was made temporary because Senate budget rules required something be temporary, and the Senate had been persuaded that something should be the part affecting the people who do not employ lobbyists.

At press time, the President was reportedly explaining at length to a group of Mar-a-Lago members exactly how much the new law would save each of them, having stipulated only minutes earlier that he himself had derived no personal benefit from any aspect of it whatsoever.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump personally, who is estimated by independent analyses to have saved in the tens of millions of dollars annually through the pass-through deduction custom-fit to commercial real estate, the doubled estate tax exemption, and the corporate rate cut applied to Trump Organization entities.
§The Trump Organization, whose hotel, golf, and licensing entities qualified for the 20 percent pass-through deduction added late in conference committee at the insistence of senators with their own commercial real estate income.
§Republican megadonors, including the Koch political network, Sheldon Adelson, and Robert Mercer, several of whom had publicly conditioned future giving on the bill's passage.
§C-suite executives at large public corporations, who directed the bulk of repatriated cash and tax savings into record stock buybacks rather than the wage increases the bill had been sold publicly to deliver.
§Heirs of large estates, who received a doubled federal estate tax exemption that exempts the top fraction of one percent of households from owing any estate tax at all.
§Private equity managers, whose carried-interest loophole the President had repeatedly pledged to close on the campaign trail and which the final bill instead preserved.
§Foreign investors in U.S. corporations, who receive the full benefit of the new 21 percent corporate rate without paying any U.S. income tax themselves.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment