President Trump’s “tax plans hardly match his populist rhetoric. Though he sold his plan to rewrite the tax code as a boon to the average American worker in a speech Wednesday, he mostly focused on the taxes paid by America’s largest corporations,” Politico reports.

“Trump argued that his plans to cut the 35 percent corporate tax rate for the first time in 30 years would benefit regular wage earners by putting more money in corporate coffers, which he said business leaders would then use to hire more people and raise wages.”

“But most economists say companies’ shareholders would be the primary beneficiaries of a corporate tax rate cut. That’s because it would make companies more profitable, which would boost their stock price while also leaving them with more money to pay out dividends.”

Jonathan Chait: “Donald Trump’s speech touting tax cuts — the largest ones ever, he promised — was devoted in large part to praise of the 1986 Tax Reform Act. ‘Our last major tax rewrite was 31 years ago,’ he said. ‘It was really something special … In 1986, Ronald Reagan led the world, cutting our tax base by 34 percent. Under this pro-America system, our economy just went beautifully through the roof.'”

“Trump has long attacked the 1986 Tax Reform Act as a disaster. The Act eliminated tax advantages for real estate, and Trump naturally equated the loss of special treatment for his own industry with harm for the economy as a whole. ‘This tax act was just an absolute catastrophe for the country,’ he told Congress in 1991. Eight years later, still fuming that Bill Bradley — a co-sponsor of the law — was running for president, Trump called it ‘one of the worst ideas in recent history.'”