Three things in life are certain: death, taxes and fact checking. This week, President Trump unveiled his (still somewhat vague) tax plan. He delivered a major speech (filled with his favorite inaccurate claims) and his aides pushed the administration’s talking points about it. First of all, nothing we saw in the announcement this week confirms Trump’s repeated claim that his tax plan will be the “biggest tax cut in U.S. history.” The details remain incomplete, but that’s a dubious claim when properly measured as a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product. ‘The wealthy are not getting a tax cut’ This is one of the biggest myths spread by Trump and his aides. The wealthy pay most of the taxes, so unless the tax plan specifically leaves them untouched — which Trump's plan does not — they will get big tax cuts. On its face, this is a ridiculous statement to make for any plan that includes reductions in tax rates. That's because federal income taxes are paid mostly by the wealthy. So when you cut income tax rates, it results in lots of dollars for the wealthiest taxpayers. The Trump tax plan drops the top bracket from 39.6 to 35 percent, and allows for the possibility of a 25 percent top rate through a pass-through entity. It presumably would also eliminate a 3.8 percent Obamacare tax on investment income that only hits upper-income tax payers. There are many other reasons, including these two major ones: The tax plan would eliminate the alternative minimum tax, which would be a boom for the wealthy. The plan also calls for eliminating the estate tax, though it’s unclear on whether any tax would be required when someone dies. Currently, the estate tax is only estimated to affect about 5,500 estates out of nearly 3 million estates because as much as $11 million can be shielded from taxation. We awarded Four Pinocchios. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we’ll check it out.  (giphy.com) Fact-checking Trump’s speech about his tax plan Below are three key claims from Trump’s speech in Indianapolis. For more, read the full round-up. "To protect millions of small businesses and the American farmer, we are finally ending the crushing, the horrible, the unfair estate tax, or as it is often referred to, the death tax."
The president's suggestion that "millions" of small businesses and farms are affected by the estate tax is absurd. Only 80 — that's right, 80 — taxable estates would be farms and small businesses, according to the Tax Policy Center. The number of estates affected by the tax has declined dramatically in recent years. In 1977, 139,000 estates had to pay the tax. In 2000, it was 52,000. But Congress has kept raising the exemption and lowering the tax rate. So for virtually all Americans, even farms and small businesses, the estate tax is just not a problem. | 
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