GOP keeps telling Americans to stop being upset about smaller refunds

If your tax refund is smaller than you expected, Republicans have a simple message for you: Stop whining.

GOP lawmakers are sick and tired of families complaining about the smaller tax refunds resulting from the tax scam Republicans rammed through the legislative process at the end of 2017.

“Isn’t it kind of stupid to look at a refund, what your refund is?” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) asked, effectively calling his constituents stupid.

Initial data from the IRS showed a steep drop in both the number of families who received a refund and a drop in the amount of the average refund. That’s not what was promised.

A month before the tax scam was signed into law, then-Speaker Paul Ryan touted higher tax refunds as one of the benefits of the legislation. For a single mother making $30,000, Ryan bragged about “a $700 increase in her tax refund each year under our tax bill.”

So when families across the country learned their refund is smaller, or that they unexpectedly owe thousands of dollars in taxes, they were shocked. When Andy Kraft of Portland, Oregon, found out that he and his wife owe more than $10,000 in taxes this year, he said, “my jaw hit the floor.”

But Republicans don’t want to hear from people like Kraft. And it’s not just Grassley who has shown contempt for families shocked by their taxes. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), one of the chief architects of the tax scam, has also had enough with families reacting negatively to the bill he championed.

“The refund picture isn’t even accurate,” Brady said on CNBC. “The refunds vary from year to year. That’s natural.” Brady and Grassley even wrote an entire op-ed in USA Today trying to convince people of how wrong they are to care about their tax refund.

But the GOP tax scam is hurting working-class families. In fact, it was never intended to benefit them. Wealthy corporations and Wall Street banks are enjoying multi-billion dollar profits. In fact, companies like Amazon, GE, and Netflix made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits last year, and each of them is still getting tax refunds worth millions. In the end, more than 80 percent of the benefits from the GOP tax scam will go to the wealthiest one percent of Americans.

“Republicans deliberately made a decision to goose the tax bill so they could get credit in the fall of 2018 and in effect saying it’s a long time until the spring of 2019 and maybe everybody would forget,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said recently. “I’m not forgetting.”

“The American people are now seeing plain and simple that the GOP’s tax law was written by corporate lobbyists without regard for working families,” Ryan Thomas, spokesperson for Tax March, told Shareblue Media in a statement. He said the tax scam “is riddled with so many errors that working and middle-class households now face thousands of dollars in higher tax bills while big corporations and the GOP’s wealthy donors reap billions. The Republican Party should be ashamed for the damage they have caused.”

“Republicans deliberately made a decision to goose the tax bill so they could get credit in the fall of 2018 and in effect saying it’s a long time until the spring of 2019 and maybe everybody would forget,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said recently. “I’m not forgetting.”

Instead of lavishing Wall Street companies with billions of dollars, Republicans could have rewritten the tax code to help working families. But they made the decision to prioritize the wealthy, and now families have to deal with the consequences — all while the GOP calls them stupid.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.