“Wealthy Americans are not getting a tax cut,” Cohn said Sept. 28 on ABC’s “Good Morning America” program.
Mnuchin’s Message
“The objective of the president is that rich people don’t get tax cuts,” Mnuchin said Oct. 1 on ABC’s “This Week” program.
But Mnuchin has since walked back his statement, pointing out that the rich pay most U.S. income taxes.
“When you’re cutting taxes across the board, it’s very hard not to give tax cuts to the wealthy with tax cuts to the middle class,” he said in an interview that aired Wednesday on Politico’s “Money” podcast.
It wasn’t the first time Mnuchin had undercut the administration’s previous message by acknowledging that the wealthy would benefit from elements in the tax plan. On Oct. 13, he said Trump’s proposed repeal of the estate tax would help the rich.
“The estate tax, I will concede, disproportionately helps rich people,” Mnuchin said during a speech to the Institute for International Finance conference.
‘Wonderful Farms’
The statement came after the administration spent weeks trying to portray the tax--which is currently paid by only a few thousand wealthy estates annually--as the bane of small family-owned businesses and working-class farmers. Cohn insisted to reporters on Sept. 28 that the wealthiest Americans use sophisticated estate planning to avoid paying the tax altogether.
Under current law, a married couple’s estate is exempt from paying inheritance taxes on the first $10.98 million, rising under an inflation index to $11.2 million in 2018.