Working Class Tax Cut

End the federal income tax on the first $150,000 you earn. For most working and middle-class families in our district, that ends the federal income-tax burden almost entirely. Not a loophole, not a carve-out you need an accountant to find — a simple, honest cut for the people who do the work. You’d still pay into Social Security and Medicare, because you earned those and you’re going to collect them. What changes is that Washington stops reaching into a working paycheck first and asking questions later.

Put up to $10,000 back in the pockets of the families who need it most. If these companies won’t raise wages or bring prices down, then the least we can do is stop taxing families into the ground and put real money back in their hands. For the working Americans who need it most, I’ll fight for up to $10,000 in refundable relief — money back to cover what the month actually costs, and the spending power to get a little ahead instead of living one emergency from the edge.

Pay for every dollar of it — with no new debt. This is the part both parties dodge. They cut taxes and run up the bill, or they quietly raise your costs somewhere else to cover it. I won’t do either. Every dollar of this tax cut is paid for by making PG&E, Big Pharma, and Big Tech finally pay their fair share — the same ones getting away with it right now. Companies like PG&E, Big Pharma, and some of the largest tech companies on earth book billions in profit and pay little or nothing in federal tax, because they can afford the armies of lobbyists and accountants to work every loophole in the code. They’re tax cheats, plain and simple. Close the loopholes, make them pay the same fair rate you already do, go after the cheating, and cut the fraud and waste that bleeds billions of your dollars every year — and the money is there. Yes, it’s enough. Your tax cut comes out of their free ride, not out of your services and not out of your children’s future.

Part of fixing that code means ending the rules that quietly reward companies for moving jobs overseas. Right now our tax rules quietly reward a corporation for moving its profits — and its jobs — overseas, then selling right back to us from abroad. We are taxing the company that builds here and rewarding the one that packs up. That is backwards, and it’s a big reason good jobs left towns like ours and never came back. I’d shut down offshore tax dodging and pair it with a pro-growth corporate plan that backs the companies investing in American workers: lower and simpler if you build it here — and a higher rate if you ship those jobs overseas. Reward building in America, penalize leaving it, and put what we collect straight into your tax cut.

And this isn’t a one-time gimmick that vanishes next year. Keep an honest corporate tax code and actually collect what the biggest corporations owe, and this tax cut is something we can sustain — year after year — because it’s funded by a fair system instead of a credit card.

Making the biggest corporations pay their fair share is pro-growth. This is exactly where the powerful try to scare you. I’ve built companies. I want them to win. There’s nothing wrong with a company earning a profit and pouring it back into workers, wages, and building something real — that’s the growth we want, and a fair tax code should reward it. What we should stop rewarding is the opposite: giant companies funneling profits into stock buybacks and executive bonuses while paying nothing back into the country that made them possible. Pro-growth means pro-building, pro-hiring, pro-worker. It does not mean letting the biggest players skip the check while your paycheck gets taxed on the way in the door.