When government takes money out of American pockets in order to redistribute it to other spending that is a tax or theft. I guess that distinction is in the eye of the beholder!
What the J.C.T. projects instead are “distributional effects,” an attempt to estimate the indirect burden on families resulting from other taxes, which in this case essentially means the possible effect on wages of requiring large corporations to pay a minimal amount of tax.
Estimating these effects is useful, but are they a “tax increase” on workers? Almost any government policy will have an adverse effect on the income of someone, somewhere; is everything the government does a tax increase?
