Bush v Trump

9/29/2015 10:27:00 AM

Here's a quick comparison of the Bush and Trump tax proposals:

You can find Bush's plan here, and Trump's plan here. Sidenote: there is a typo, I think, in Bush's plan. He labeled the $11,300 bracket shown here as "standard deduction," but I think what he meant was not a standard deduction but a 0 percent tax bracket. They are very similar concepts but work differently: the standard deduction reduces your taxable income first, then you calculate how much of your income falls in each of the tax brackets using this reduced number second, whereas a 0 percent bracket doesn't deduce anything from the taxable income figure used to calculate liabilities in the other brackets. If you take Bush's tax plan literally he's saying there would be no tax on the first $22,600 of income, but since he didn't mention the tax rate on the $0-$11,300 I think he meant his "standard deduction" to actually be a 0 percent tax bracket, not a deduction.

Here's a graph of the two:

Min Income $0
Max Income $500000
What you can see is that Trump cuts taxes far more aggressively than Bush. So it's no surprise that Trump's plan costs far more than Bush's--$10.8 trillion for Trump's compared to $3.4 trillion for Bush's over 10 years. You can also see there are a handful of wealthy but not extremely rich people that pay slightly more under Bush's plan than current law, because Bush lowers the income threshold for the 28 percent tax bracket.