Former Vice President Mike Pence’s political advocacy group has launched a $10 million campaign to extend Trump-era tax cuts that expire next year and are expected to play a key role in the 2024 election.
Advancing American Freedom on Thursday announced plans for a “nationwide grassroots education campaign” to defend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was signed into law in 2017 when Pence was vice president.
The effort will also include engaging directly with Congress through seminars, policy memos and grassroots advocacy, the group said. The campaign is expected to continue through 2025, when lawmakers must act to extend or let Trump administration tax cuts expire.
“Advancing American Freedom is launching a campaign to protect the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the biggest tax cuts and tax reform in American history, which will allow Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money and bring jobs back to America,” Pence said in a statement.
“The last few years of the Biden administration have shown us that you can’t spend your way out of inflation, and you can’t tax your way out of a spending problem,” he added. “Washington has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. The national debt is out of control, and taxing the American people more is not the solution.”
Former President Trump signed his signature legislative achievement into law on December 22, 2017. The law reduced personal income tax rates, increased the standard deduction and child tax credit, reduced the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, and overhauled the way U.S. companies tax their overseas earnings.
President Biden frequently criticized the Trump tax cuts during his 2020 presidential run, even saying he wanted to “repeal” the tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and corporations. But Biden and Democrats did not repeal any Trump-era law while they controlled the White House and both houses of Congress in 2021 and 2022.
Most of the tax provisions for individuals in the bill, including those that provided tax cuts for low- and middle-income families, will expire at the end of 2025. Proposals on how to handle the expiring provisions are expected to play an important role not only in the presidential election, but also in key Senate races in states such as Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimates that the 2017 tax law will add $1.5 trillion to the deficit between 2018 and 2027. Lawmakers estimate that extending all provisions that are scheduled to expire or be downgraded would cost $3.8 trillion through 2033.
Pence’s group released a 13-page memo Thursday outlining policy measures that would best protect American taxpayers, including preserving the 2017 personal tax cuts, maintaining a low corporate tax rate and addressing the government debt through comprehensive spending reform rather than balancing the budget by raising taxes.
During his brief presidential campaign last year, Pence spoke publicly about the need to reform the entitlement system to rein in the national debt and criticized Trump and others for ignoring the issue.
