Poll: Most Americans don’t think the Republican tax bill will really cut their taxes

Half of Americans think the Republican tax plan will lead to higher taxes for them, not lower, according to a new Monmouth University poll. The survey lands as Republicans barrel toward getting their bill on the president’s desk this week.

The poll, released Monday, found that 50 percent of the public believes the federal taxes they pay will go up under the GOP’s proposal; 25 percent think their taxes will stay the same, and just 14 percent say their taxes will go down. (Most Americans will see an immediate, though temporary, tax cut.) Republicans have continually tried to frame their plan as a middle-class tax cut, but the idea doesn’t appear to be trickling down to most Americans.

Just 26 percent of respondents said they approve of the Republican tax proposal, while 47 percent said they disapprove. And most Americans prefer the GOP abandon ship on their current proposal, with 39 percent saying lawmakers should scrap the current plan and start over and 24 percent saying the tax system should be left alone. Only 29 percent said they wanted Congress to work out a deal to pass the current proposal.

The poll was conducted from December 10 to 12, before the final conference version of the Senate and House tax bills was released on Friday.

But Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said its findings are still significant in a statement accompanying the results. “The basic contours of the plan remain the same. Many Americans see this bill more as an attempt by Republicans to gain a political victory and would rather see Congress scrap this plan and start over,” he said.

As NBC News’s Benjy Sarlin pointed out on Twitter, most Americans would actually get at least an initial tax cut, albeit perhaps temporary. Under the GOP’s proposal, tax cuts for individuals expire at the end of 2025. And by 2027, over half of all Americans would indeed pay more in taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center’s analysis of the bill.

But the public isn’t wrong to be skeptical of the plan and who it will mostly benefit — corporations and the wealthy, even if Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and other Republicans claim otherwise. Vox’s Ezra Klein recently wrote about the public’s (correct) reason for skepticism:

Rather than argue for the bill on its merits, Republicans have mostly lied about its design, framing it as a middle-class tax cut when it is clearly something very different, pretending it will pay for itself rather than deciding that it is either worth paying for or worth not paying for. There have been few hearings, few speeches, and an extraordinarily rushed process. Democrats legitimately thought the public would like Obamacare if they just knew more about what was in it. Republicans do not seem to hold that confidence in their own legislation.

Perhaps that simply reflects a more extreme strain of conviction politics: Republicans believe in a trickle-down theory of economic growth even though they don’t believe they can persuade the public of its merits, and so they’re going to do what they think is best and worry about the consequences afterward.

The GOP’s plan will increase the deficit by an estimated $1.5 trillion, or $1 trillion after taking into account economic growth, and largely stick middle-class Americans with the bill. Republicans have suggested they may seek to finance the tax cuts by slashing entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps. “We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a radio interview earlier this month.

GOP leaders say economic growth and reduced corporate taxes will result in more jobs and better wages, but the evidence that will actually be the case is scant.

The Washington Post on Friday pointed out that the plan could actually push more jobs overseas, noting that many tax experts say the legislation fails to eliminate incentives for companies to move abroad and could instead increase them, namely through implementing a new minimum tax on overseas income.

The Tax Policy Center’s Steve Rosenthal recently laid out such a case in a blog post. “The minimum tax is intended to target, indirectly, profits from intangible property held abroad (such as patents, trademarks, brand names, and software), which can be highly mobile. Unfortunately, the bill’s approach could still encourage production and profits to be shifted abroad,” he wrote.

The Wall Street Journal this weekend published a story pointing out that cash returning from overseas under the Republican tax plan isn’t likely to create jobs and, in fact, could reduce them. And there aren’t really provisions in the Republican plan that would push corporations to share the benefits of a reduced rate in the US or abroad instead of putting them toward, say, dividends and buybacks for shareholders.

“I personally wish they had done more to directly link corporate rate reductions and pass-throughs, for that matter, to real and tangible benefits for employees, things like IRA matching or employee profit sharing or employee ownership,” Dean Zerbe, managing director at tax consultancy Alliantgroup and former tax counsel to the Senate Finance Committee, recently told me. “They would have had a better and easier time of selling it and convincing folks that this was real. Now, they’re just going to have to hope that all their words come to fruition.”

At the moment, the public’s not buying it, but that’s not stopping plans to pass the final version of the bill by Wednesday of this week.