The media and President Biden have consistently misrepresented President Trump’s signature tax reform legislation. During the 2020 campaign, candidates Biden and Harris both promised to undo all of the Trump tax cuts on “day one.” Fortunately for the economy and the country, Congress has not allowed the full Biden tax hike agenda to become law. The Biden tax plan, if implemented, would destroy millions of jobs while wiping out small businesses and family farms across the country that are already struggling to stay afloat. As Biden and some Democrats in Congress attempt to bury Americans with tax increases across the board, new data from the IRS has exposed their outright lies about the Trump tax cuts.
Who remembers Nancy Pelosi saying the 2017 tax cuts would amount to “Armageddon”? Or the media consistently claiming that Trump and his family would be the only ones who benefited? New statistics prove what many already knew: the Democrats’ fainting couches and pearl-clutching over tax cuts was pure theater and not founded on any legitimate concerns. New data show that the tax cuts worked for everyday Americans. This the Hill editorial makes that clear by exploring the real numbers that we now have: “credits and other reforms to the tax code, shows that filers with an adjusted gross income (AGI) of $15,000 to $50,000 enjoyed an average tax cut of 16 percent to 26 percent in 2018, the first year Republicans’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect and the most recent year for which data is available. Filers who earned $50,000 to $100,000 received a tax break of about 15 percent to 17 percent, and those earning $100,000 to $500,000 in adjusted gross income saw their personal income taxes cut by around 11 percent to 13 percent. By comparison, no income group with an AGI of at least $500,000 received an average tax cut exceeding 9 percent, and the average tax cut for brackets starting at $1 million was less than 6 percent.” This sounds precisely like what President Trump and Republicans in Congress had in mind when they pushed hard to overcome Democratic obstruction and media harassment in order to pass common-sense tax reform.
The Trump tax cuts certainly were not perfect. A compromise was needed along the way to get any tax reform passed through the Senate in 2017. The numbers do show the tax cuts were helpful across all income groups and certainly have turned out to be a far cry from Speaker Pelosi’s imagined “Armageddon.” It turns out that all of the countless headlines about the irresponsibility of cutting taxes and the countless Democratic floor speeches were completely wrong. This too often is par for the course for an entrenched corporate media with a clear agenda. The new numbers confirming tax cuts happened across the board make it harder to perpetrate those lies. Cutting taxes for all Americans led to one of the largest economic booms in history during 2019, and the media did even worse covering (or not covering) that overwhelmingly positive economic news.
So when the left tries to claim that Trump only cared about the rich, remind them of the real numbers. According to Justin Haskins from the Heartland Institute, “The fact is, Republicans’ 2017 tax reform law did exactly what was promised: It lowered taxes for all income groups, provided the greatest benefits for middle-income households, and spurred economic growth that helped reduce poverty and improve prosperity.” Don’t expect that to stop Democrats in Congress and the administration from continuing to claim that the 2017 tax cuts only helped the rich. They will do so ironically while they push for trillions in tax hikes that they claim will only hurt the rich. We have heard that one before.
Bob Carlstrom is President of AMAC Action