McCormick criticizes Casey for not supporting Trump’s tax cuts for the rich
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act slashed tax rates for GOP Senate nominee Dave McCormick and his billionaire backers but did little for working families.
Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Senate nominee Dave McCormick is criticizing incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey for not backing former President Donald Trump’s signature tax law in 2017. The law mostly benefited the wealthiest Americans and large corporations and actually hurt millions of working families and older Americans.
McCormick, a millionaire and Connecticut-based former hedge fund CEO, tweeted on May 31: “The Trump tax cuts helped attract new investment to PA communities like Erie that have historically struggled to grow and lost businesses overseas. But Bob Casey voted against that legislation and voted in favor of providing tax breaks to coastal elites.”
He previously framed the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as “tax cuts for Pennsylvania working families” and falsely claimed President Joe Biden wants to raise taxes for middle-class people. McCormick and Trump have both proposed making permanent the law’s individual tax provisions, which are set to expire in 2025.
The 2017 legislation permanently reduced corporate tax rates, created new deductions for business owners who report profits as individual income, and dropped the top tax rate from 39.6% to 37% for eight years. It contained minimal tax savings for many working families and actually raised taxes for 10 million families. As Casey noted in an April 2024 report, the law also eliminated an IRS rule that let people who fall victim to scams deduct their losses when filing their tax returns.
Casey opposed the legislation, saying at the time: “Congressional Republicans are not pursuing tax reform, just a massive tax giveaway to the super-rich at the expense of the middle class. Eighty percent of the Republican tax plan goes to the top 1 percent by 2027 — that’s a bad deal for middle class families and workers.”
McCormick has repeatedly complained about the national debt, which rose by $7.8 trillion under Trump. Though Trump ran in 2016 on a promise to quickly balance the budget and pay off the entire existing debt, his tax law was projected to add between $1 trillion and $2 trillion to the deficit over seven years. A recent estimate by the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation suggested that extending the law would add another $4 trillion to the debt over the next decade.
Biden and his Democratic allies have proposed allowing Trump’s tax cuts to expire for those earning more than $400,000 annually and to increase revenue from large corporations.
Contrary to McCormick’s claims, the 2017 law did not do much to spur the economy. A March 2024 working paper published by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research found only a small fraction of the cost of its corporate tax cuts were offset by new stimulated growth.
The law’s biggest impact was a significant reduction in the tax burden for top earners like McCormick and the billionaires bankrolling his candidacy.
According to the website PoliticsPA, Casey said in April: “I think the people of Pennsylvania understand that when you have a candidate like that … (you) can’t trust him to be on the side of workers; to be on the side of families; and to be on the side of the most vulnerable. He’s made it very clear whose side he is on. He is on the side of big corporations.”
