Nonprofit group Patriotic Millionaires says Trump’s tax plans would hurt Pennsylvania
Retired Pennsylvania energy entrepreneur Ritchie Tabachnick, a member of the group, says the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did nothing to help the economy or his employees.

President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress in 2017 passed a law that slashed tax rates for large corporations and the wealthiest individuals. Now, as they push to extend and expand the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and to slash government programs to pay for it, many of those wealthy individuals who benefited most are urging Congress to raise their own taxes.
Ritchie Tabachnick, a retired Pennsylvanian who served as president of Equipment & Controls Africa Group, a Pittsburgh-based multinational engineering services company that works with the energy sector in Africa, is a member of a nonprofit coalition called Patriotic Millionaires. The group advocates for liveable wages, a progressive tax system, and campaign finance reform.
In a phone interview with the Pennsylvania Independent, Tabachnick recalled that when the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act became law, he was the highest-paid employee at his company. “I was the only person in the company who got a tax cut,” Tabachnick said. “All of our middle-income employees, $50,000- to $100,000-a-year-income employees saw no benefit.”
“It didn’t change my life at all,” Tabachnick said. “As I told an investment adviser, he was the big winner. It gave me a few extra bucks to put in.”
Trump’s law permanently lowered corporate tax rates and temporarily reduced tax rates for individuals, mostly for those earning $500,000 or more annually through 2025. As Congress passed the plan in December 2017, Trump called it “one of the great Christmas gifts to middle-income people” and claimed it would give “MASSIVE tax cuts for working families across America.” In reality, low-income individuals saved just about $60 a year, middle-income earners saved less than $1,000 on average annually, and the top 0.1% of earners saved an annual average of more than $190,000.
Tabachnick pointed to an October 2024 analysis by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economy Policy showing Trump’s proposals to extend the 2017 law, make additional tax cuts, and impose tariffs on international goods would actually increase taxes for everyone but the top 5% of wage earners. “If these policies were in effect in 2026,” he said, “the wealthiest 1% would receive an average of a $36,000 tax cut. The bottom 20% would pay about $790 more per year in taxes.”
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), and other congressional Republicans all back Trump’s proposals. They claim doing so will help spur economic growth and are considering an array of cuts to government programs to help pay for the tax cuts, including possibly slashing funding for clean energy infrastructure, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
Referencing his own study of data from the Federal Reserve Bank, the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and think-tank analyses, Tabachnick said: “The impact on the economy was kind of nil to negative for everyone except the wealthiest. We had seven years in a row of job growth. Job growth actually slowed after the tax cuts, and it was a pretty significant slowdown in job creation. Also we had, from the end of the great recession until the passage of the tax cut, we had pretty steady median wage growth, and wages stagnated after the tax cuts. In fact, 2019, there was actually a very slight decline in median income. This is pre-COVID.”
Making the 2017 law permanent, he said, would bring more of the same: “I think we’re going to get less corporate investment, more stock buybacks. That was the one thing that did grow after the tax cuts. We went from approximately $200 billion a year in stock buybacks to a trillion within a few years, and that benefits the wealthiest. The wealthiest few own a huge percentage of the money stock market.”
The proposed cuts, Tabachnick added, would only make the economy worse: “Investing in infrastructure enables business. We need roads, we need bridges, we need transportation systems, we need airports. Business relies on these things. To say that the private sector is more efficient or doesn’t need government programs is just false. In terms of the social safety net. I think a market economy needs a social safety net. Market economies will always have business cycles. They’ll always have periods of reduced employment. And without a social safety net, we would have social instability. We should be strengthening the safety net if we want to encourage business.”
A September assessment by economists at Goldman Sachs, reviewed by several news outlets, predicted that Trump’s economic and immigration policies would reduce net gross domestic product, increase inflation, and result in 30,000 fewer new jobs each month. A December analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that extending Trump’s 2017 tax law would add $4.6 trillion to the national debt and shrink the economy in the long term.