“Misleading Claims about the Big Beautiful Bill”
- nebraskansforpeace
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
The Omaha World Herald printed their OpEd with basic factual errors but declined to
print the following Letter to the Editor, by NFP Board Member Ryan Wishart, pointing
them out.
The editorial “We're Nebraska's U.S. Congressmen. Here's why we supported the Big
Beautiful Bill”, written by Nebraska's three congressmen contains an important factual
error that undermines their justification and raises questions about their knowledge of
tax policy.
They write: “the top 1 percent of earners now pay more than 40 percent of income
taxes, compared with 24 percent prior to [the 2017] TCJA as part of their justification
for making Trump's 2017 tax law permanent. In fact, their cited source shows that only
the richest 0.1% paid 24 percent of the taxes in 2017. Their math misses an entire row
accounting for the top 99th to 99.9th percent's share. The top 1 percent’s share was
44.9 in 2017, not 24 percent. Contrary to their editorial, cited US Treasury tables show
the top 1 percent has a lower, not higher, total share of income taxes paid under
Trump's tax plan (42.7% in 2022, 44.4% in 2025). Treasury data also show the share of
taxes paid by people with incomes in the bottom 50% have increased.
Their editorial also suggests that the pass-through income tax deduction benefited
middle class households and family farms, and “as result [sic]” the 1% paid a larger
share of taxes. In fact, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggests the exact
opposite: the top 1% of households received more than half the total tax benefits of the
pass-through income tax deduction. So, the Nebraska congressional delegation also
had an incorrect cause for their dramatically incorrect effect.
Nebraskans deserve a better and factual discussion of why our representatives chose
to extend tax cuts for the ultra rich. We deserve to know why they supported making
permanent tax changes that they can’t explain, have the opposite results they claim,
and didn’t bother to verify against their own sources.