Trump signs GOP tax plan that will reward rich and punish poor

US President Donald Trump has signed the sweeping Republican tax bill, which some analysts say will reward the rich and punish the majority of working people.

Trump enacted his first major legislative accomplishment into law on Friday, two days after the Republican plan was adopted by Congress in a major political victory.

Trump signed the massive $1.5 trillion tax bill shortly before departing for a year-end break at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

"I watched the news this morning and they were all saying, will he keep his promise, will he sign it by Christmas?" Trump told reporters at the White House

"And I called downstairs and said 'Get it ready, we have to sign it now,'" he stated.

The Republican-led Senate on Wednesday approved the tax legislation, which includes permanent tax breaks for corporations and temporary tax cuts for individuals.

With all Democrats united in opposition, the Senate passed the bill by a 51-48 party line vote.

The House of Representatives, which approved a nearly identical bill earlier on Tuesday, approved the final Republican plan on Wednesday to overhaul the tax code.

Under the tax proposal, the top rate of income tax will drop from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, in a move that will intensify criticism of the deal as overly generous to the wealthy and big business.

Wealthy business owners, such as Trump, stand to gain from a provision in the Republican tax bill that creates a valuable deduction for owners of pass-through businesses, Democrats and some tax experts say.

The provision creates a 20-percent business income deduction, with some limits, for sole proprietors and owners in partnerships and other non-corporate enterprises.

PressTV-US tax bill favors wealthy, harms working-class: Experts

Wealthy business owners stand to gain from a provision in the Republican tax bill that creates a valuable deduction for owners of pass-through businesses,

It was initially sold by Republicans as a way to help small businesses and create jobs. But the final formula for determining what types of businesses can benefit has widened to take in companies with few, if any, workers, critics said.

"As you know, $3.2 trillion in tax cuts for American families," Trump said. "And they're going to start to see that because we're signing today."

"We're going to bring back probably $4 trillion from overseas," he said. "Corporations are literally going wild over this."

"This is something that Republicans wanted for years and Democrats wanted for years and yet it never got done. Now it's being done,” he added.

Trump departed the White House right after the signing ceremony. "We'll be working in Florida, I'll be working very hard during that Christmas because we have many things we're talking about, including North Korea, including a lot of things happening in the Middle East as you know."

In a recent statement about the tax plan, Trump had said, “I promised the American people a big, beautiful tax cut for Christmas. With final passage of this legislation, that is exactly what they are getting.”

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The newly passed GOP tax bill in the Republican controlled Congress is meant to help big business, says a former American intelligence linguist.

Trump also signs short-term government funding bill

On Friday, Trump also signed a short-term spending bill to fund the government, hours before the midnight Friday deadline to avert a government shutdown.

On Thursday night, Congress narrowly passed the temporary spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. Representatives voted 231-188 for the bill to fund federal government for another four weeks, and then the measure cleared the Senate, 66-32.

A number of Democratic senators opposed the bill because it did not address the fate of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who came to the United States as children, but Democrats from Republican-leaning states voted in favor of the measure.

The stopgap legislation would keep the government from closing down at midnight Friday and would give more time to members of Congress to reach an agreement on funding for the remainder of the 2018 fiscal year.

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