For 2017, the estate and gift tax exemption is $5.49 million per individual. That means an individual can leave $5.49 million to heirs and pay no federal estate or gift tax. It is projected that 2.7 million people will die in 2017. An estate tax will be paid by about 1 in 487 of the decedents. Of course, Many of those won’t be too much over the exemption and wouldn’t be paying much. Some of Donald Trump’s sort would be paying plenty. Donald has tried to make the tax sound like an assault on small American farmers. 

Trump’s plan to eliminate the estate tax would help the top 1% of the population who pay it. That’s 4,918 tax returns, but they contribute $17 billion in taxes.

Meanwhile, as Donald Trump attempts to con voters in circumstances far-less affluent than his buddies, please stop and consider the age-old truism that there “is no such thing as a free lunch” and no “pie in the sky.” It is estimated that the Trump tax “reform” package has a built-in $1.5- or $2-trillion increase in the federal debt. But, hey! say Donald and his back-slappers, that will be more than made up in the growth of the economy, in the Gross National Product and all that. Jobs growing on bushes everywhere. Yeah, sure. That sounds a lot like what was disastrously concocted in recent years by the governor of Kansas.

Promises, promises; everything’s going to trickle down to the common man. Don’t hold your breath. And never mind that the “growth” will be, as usual, merely in the bank accounts of the already obscenely wealthy—like, say, the Trump family.

Without the actual come-to-pass of this self-serving, plutocratic pipe-dream disguised as “reform,” leading economists figure the entire scheme would wind up $4 or $5 trillion in the hole.

We will begin accruing interest-due to the Chinese, Japanese, domestic fat-cats and others from the get-go. And our mixed Republican-Plutocrat regime never will get around to paying a dime on the principal of the actual debt. The same debt that Republicans harped at and proposed to reduce throughout the Obama years and the 2016 election campaign. 

The current interest on the debt is $266 billion, which the federal government much pay each year. That's from the federal budget for fiscal year 2017 (October 1, 2016, through September 30, 2017). That's debt owed to individuals, businesses, and foreign central banks. Most (95 percent) is Treasury bills, notes, and bonds. The public debt is said to be $20,453,245,142,792 as I write this. HOWEVER, “That’s not the real number because all of your entitlement spending is kept off book on a different ledger. The real number is more like 70 to 75 trillion dollars — and so when you set that up against U.S. GDP, the only time we ever had a debt-to-GDP ratio like this was on the eve of the Great Depression.”— Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), town hall meeting in Elkhorn, Neb., March 17, 2017

And somehow, thanks to smoke and mirrors,  we’ll apparently have plenty of money to throw around as Donald dons his T-Man cape, shouts “Shazam!” and tries to play American hero in his special hypocritical and simplistic way 

In calling his plan the greatest thing since humanoids learned to walk on two feet, Donald promises average workers a sudden increase of $4,000 a year of income (or perhaps up to $9,000 per family). There is no actual basis for this deluded fabrication. That added-income speculation is a nebulous thing, based on some sort of way-out possibility that lower corporate taxes would “trickle down” to the little people. That figure is based on a report by Trump’s chief economist, Kevin Hassett, who looked at various studies (in search of verification of a Trump castle in the air) to gauge how cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20% today might affect workers’ pay. 

One noted economist (Harvard finance professor Mihir Desai) said this income-enhancement assumption is overly high—“Cutting corporate taxes will help wages but exaggeration only serves to undercut the reasonableness of the core argument.” And in a briefing with reporters, even Donald’s man Hassett allows that “It’s hard to come up with a model that jumps to $4,000 in the first year.” 

Tax cuts for corporations, meanwhile, will more likely go to dividends for large investors. What is the incentive for corporations to raise wages? It’s all just one more big lie, distortion, distraction, misrepresentation, diversion, beguilement, example of disoriented ignorance or whatever you want to call it from Donald Trump.

In fact, no one knows quite how long it might take for a corporate tax rate to start affecting wages. Experts estimate that average household income under the GOP tax reform framework might rise by $3,500 within six to eight years. Oh, really?! How does plain old inflation factor into that?

No one bothers to mention that the whole schlemiel of budget, health care, taxes also involves huge increases in the cost of—or total loss of—health-care insurance, cutting Medicare and Medicaid off at the knees (some $73 billion would be cut from Medicare and $1 trillion from Medicaid), the end of funding for all manner of social, scientific and educational programs. Even if that $4,000 is anywhere near real, it could be wiped out quickly by the upcoming increase in the cost of health care insurance and dealing with other social takeaways courtesy of Donald Trump and his Congress—in both the budget and tax plan, not to mention Obamacare.

Health care, the budget, the tax plan all are inter-locking pieces of Trump’s plutocratic vision for America.  

Some features of just the tax plan: It would add $7 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade. It would slow economic growth in the long run.

The Trump tax plan eliminates various deductions for the average citizen, including the one for state and local taxes. The framework allows taxpayers to subtract $4,050 from income for each person claimed on the tax return, but families with many children would pay higher taxes despite the increased standard deductions. While the plan lowers the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20%, it doesn’t provide that much real relief to many large corporations, which can afford high-priced attorneys who already help them avoid paying more than about 15%. 

"There will be NO change to your 401(k). This has always been a great and popular middle class tax break that works, and it stays!" Donald said in a tweet the other day out of the blue. This plan allows people to defer taxes on money set aside for retirement—up to $18,000 a year for younger people, $24,000 for those over 50.  However, the actual word on the street is that the GOP Congress will write in a maximum allowable amount for one and all of $2,400. The Republican Congress wants that tax revenue NOW rather than later, to help pay for the drunken-sailor giveaways to the very wealthy being proposed from all directions.

Donald trump knows little and cares less about what he perceives as the middle class, let alone the sub-middle and impoverished classes. 

For the inattentive and ill-informed, if you buy Trump’s imitation of a bull with intestinal distress, go ahead and go for it. Perhaps a compassionate Democratic samaritan will pick you up and restore your soul somewhere down the road. 

TWEET OF THE WEEK: “It was a very positive meeting,” Republican Sen. Kennedy says after Trump GOP lunch. “Nobody called anyone an ignorant sl*t.”  (Throw a "u" in the middle of that word; I'm having issues with the censor here.)