With just 19 days left before the election, Donald Trump is desperately trying to muddy the waters around his tax plan. But there’s no getting around it: cumulatively, his proposals would hurt millions of working people while giving a tiny fraction of wealthy people like us yet another break.

Our friends at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) recently analyzed the distributional impact of Trump’s tax proposals for a second term in office. These policies include: extending the temporary provisions of his 2017 tax law that are scheduled to expire at the end of 2025 (with the exception of its $10,000 cap on State and Local Tax deductions, which Trump has flip-flopped on and promised to restore); exempting certain types of income from taxes, including overtime pay, tips, and Social Security benefits; reducing the corporate tax rate from 21% to 20%, and further to 15% for companies that manufacture their products in America; repealing green energy tax credits enacted as part of President Biden and Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act; and imposing a new 20% tariff on imports, with a special 60% tariff on goods from China.

To put it mildly, ITEP’s findings were nothing short of shocking. It has always been crystal clear that Trump had an abysmal track record on tax policy, but the analysis from ITEP was a grim wake-up call regarding the extent to which his new proposals would enrich the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

According to the report, here’s what would happen if all of Trump’s tax proposals went into effect in 2026: 

• Only the richest 5% of earners would receive a tax cut. All other income groups would experience a tax increase.
• The richest 1% of earners (making over $914,900) would receive an average tax cut of $36,320. Meanwhile, the bottom 20% of earners (earning below $28,600) would see an average tax hike of $790 and the middle 20% (earning $55,100 – $94,100) would see an average hike of $1,530.
• The impact of Trump’s proposals when measured as a share of income is even worse. The richest 1% would receive a tax cut equal to 1.2% of their income, while the bottom 20% of earners would experience a tax hike equal to 4.8% of their income.
• Extending provisions of Trump’s 2017 tax bill and exempting certain types of income from taxes would give all taxpayers across the income spectrum a tax cut, but for earners outside the top 5%, this would be more than offset by the large tax increases, i.e. price increases, that would result from Trump’s tariffs.

So what, you may ask, does Trump have to say about all this? Nothing intelligible, for starters.

Judging by the interview that he gave yesterday with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago, it’s not entirely clear Trump understands his own economic policies beyond a shallow but unflappable belief that tax cuts are good. Over the course of an hour, Micklethwait pressed Trump about the various pitfalls of his economic proposals but was unsuccessful in gathering any kind of meaningful response from him. When cornered, Trump resorted to personally attacking Micklethwait and deflecting to other subjects in his self-styled “weave” where he rambles nonsensically from topic to topic. He even took the opportunity to propose raising tariffs as high as 50%. Trump further called tariffs “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” but when Micklethwait pressed him about the damage that they would do to the average consumer, Trump insisted that all was well because he was “always good at mathematics.” It was a bizarre performance, even for the self-proclaimed “very stable genius.”

But Trump and his team don’t just stop at deflecting and “weaving” around the uncomfortable and inconvenient truth that his tax proposals will hurt the poor to help the rich. They have also taken to outright lying about it. The Trump campaign has spent $450,000 airing a 30-second TV ad in five swing states that contrasts Trump and Harris on taxes. The ad starts by quoting an August 22nd piece from The New York Times, “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes,” and then finishes by stating that Trump will cut taxes. But Trump oh-so-conveniently left out the second half of the full sentence in the Times, which was “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.”

Harris’ tax plans would be a complete 180 from Trump’s. Her proposals – including raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%; quadrupling the stock buyback tax from 1% to 4%; repealing the reduced tax rate on foreign-derived intangible income (which has helped 15 major companies avoid more than $1 billion in taxes); increasing the top income tax rate to 39.6%; expanding the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit; and providing a $25,000 tax credit to first-time homebuyers – will work to give much-needed financial relief to working Americans and force wealthy people like us to start paying our fair share in taxes. One analysis found that, under these and some of Harris’ other tax plans, in 2025, the bottom 20% of earners would see their after-tax incomes increase by 16.5%, while the top 1% would witness a 9.5% decrease in income.

In case we haven’t said it enough, 2025 will be a pivotal year for taxes in America. (It’s now even being called the “Super Bowl of Tax.“) When many of the individual provisions of the 2017 Trump tax law expire at the end of next year, the newly elected president and Congress will have the unique opportunity to essentially rewrite the tax code. How they do that depends on which party wins which branch of government.

If lawmakers really want to reinvigorate our economy, give workers some financial breathing room, and finally start reeling in extreme levels of inequality, one thing is clear: Trump’s tax playbook isn’t the way to do it. And no matter how much Trump may try, no amount of “weaving” will change that.