Commentary: If Only We Could Get Back the Taxes We Overpaid Before Trump

by Meshawn Maddock

 

The overtaxation scandal in Detroit underscores the importance of giving President Trump four more years in the White House, lest the tax-and-spend Democrats drown working Americans in a flood of new taxes.

By now, you may have seen The Detroit News investigative report on the City of Detroit systematically overtaxing residents by overvaluing their homes in the aftermath of the real estate crash, from 2010 to 2016. The victims are clear about how galling it is to have been forced to pay more than what they fairly owed, especially at a time when many families were already struggling financially.

The city quietly reassessed home values in 2017, but the damage had already been done, with tens of thousands of homeowners finding themselves evicted by the government because they couldn’t afford the inflated property tax assessments.

Michiganders weren’t the only ones overpaying, though. The whole country labored through the Great Recession under the burden of excessive federal income tax rates, which depressed our recovery throughout the Obama years.

Today, thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the signature piece of legislation from President Trump’s first year in office, the average Michigan taxpayer owes the federal government about $1,400 less in annual income tax. Predictably, these lower rates have corresponded with a boom in employment and wages, with more than 110,000 new jobs created in Michigan alone since the President took office.

How does it feel to know that we were paying so much more before President Trump took office, including in years when the economy was truly in the dumps?

With a few years of experience, it’s fair to conclude that we were paying much more than we needed to. I, for one, don’t know a whole lot of people who are eager to cough up an extra $1,400 in new taxes next year.

And yet, a small group of people think it’s only “fair” that we should all pay more in taxes — even though they couch that opinion in rhetoric about “millionaires and billionaires,” their schemes would inevitably increase the tax burden on the middle class. I’m talking, of course, about the slate of Democratic presidential candidates. Senator Elizabeth Warren takes great pains to avoid acknowledging this fact, for instance, but even the news outlets friendliest to her candidacy acknowledge that her plans for socialized medicine and trillions of dollars in new federal spending mean enormous tax increases on middle-income Americans.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden, and every other Democrat candidate has the same ambition. In their view, it’s not “fair” to let Americans spend our money as we see fit. They’d rather give trillions more of our dollars to the same kind of government bureaucrats who stole $600 million from struggling Detroit families.

Their unrelenting advocacy of “Green New Deals” and “Medicare for All” — not to mention “Freedom Dividends” and college “loan forgiveness” — means one thing: the Democrats don’t want to let working Americans keep so much of our hard-earned money. To them, “fairness” means handing our paychecks over to unaccountable government bureaucrats to spend on misguided utopian projects and discredited socialist efforts to control the economy.

The “tax and spend” era of big-government boondoggles ended decades ago — and it was declared dead by, of all people, John F. Kennedy. Turning back now, especially in light of our present prosperity, would be foolhardy. It’s bad enough that we can’t get to recoup all the money we overpaid in the Obama era. We can’t let the Democrats take away the pro-growth Trump tax cuts that have improved so many lives in Michigan and across the country since they took effect either.

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Meshawn Maddock was a Michigan delegate for Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. She is also the Co-founder of Michigan Trump Republicans and the wife of Michigan State Representative Matt Maddock.
Photo “Meshawn Maddock” by Meshawn Maddock.