Political | Process

In 2017, President Donald J. Trump and Congress, which was then controlled by members of the Republican Party, passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) into law. (Most of its provisions did not go into effect until 2018.)[1]

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• A careful analysis of the IRS tax data, one that includes the effects of tax 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. (For more detailed data, see my table published here.)

• That means most middle-income and working-class earners enjoyed a tax cut that was at least double the size of tax cuts received by households earning $1 million or more.

• What’s more, IRS data shows earners in higher income brackets contributed a bigger slice of the total income tax revenue pie following the passage of the tax reform law than they had in the previous year.

• In fact, every income bracket with filers earning $200,000 or more increased its tax burden in 2018 compared to 2017, and every income bracket with a top limit lower than $200,000 paid a smaller proportion of the total personal tax revenue collected.

• That means that Republicans’ tax reform law resulted in the tax code becoming slightly more progressive – the exact opposite of what Democrats have claimed over the past four years.

• The IRS data further shows that the tax reform law – which included a variety of business tax cuts, including a large reduction in the corporate income tax rate – spurred economic mobility.