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Mullin: GOP Tax Plan Gives Middle Class "Significant" Tax Cut

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U.S. House Republicans have positioned their party to pass a tax reform bill without Democrats’ support.

They passed a budget resolution Thursday that will allow the Senate to pass the proposal with only a simple majority, similar to procedures used for recent Affordable Care Act repeal efforts.

Oklahoma Rep. Markwayne Mullin took to Twitter on Wednesday to field questions about the GOP tax plan. He pushed back against a question about the proposal being a tax hike for workers and a tax cut for the wealthy.

"The middle class will see a significant tax cut, and even those that are below the middle class," Mullin said.

The proposal cuts the top rate for the wealthy, lowers business taxes and consolidates seven brackets into three.

"You're going to start at 0 [percent]. Then, we're going to move to 12 to 25, and on the high end, 35," Mullin said. "So, at the end of the day, everybody receives a tax cut with this."

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates the average middle-class taxpayer will save $940 dollars in the first year, but one in three of them will pay more in taxes within 10 years.

About three-fourths of the tax cut will go to people making more than $149,000, and more than half of it will go to people earning more than $732,800.

The top 1 percent of earners will get 80 percent of the savings from the tax proposal within 10 years.

Mullin said the plan will be good for Oklahoma, especially rural parts of the state.

"One thing that this tax plan does is it keeps the money local. We know if we're investing in our community, we're going to see job growth and we're going to see the economy in our backyards grow, not just in Washington, D.C.," Mullin said.

Matt Trotter joined KWGS as a reporter in 2013. Before coming to Public Radio Tulsa, he was the investigative producer at KJRH. His freelance work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and on MSNBC and CNN.