Republicans are crowing about the tax cuts. Let’s discuss who really benefitted. 
Rant of the Day
“Working-class Americans have experienced a paycheck bump”? ARE YOU KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW? Here are the facts:
Let’s start with the middle class since that’s the one they brag about most. Even the White House’s own numbers show middle-class families got roughly $600-$800 for the ENTIRE YEAR, about $50-$65 a month.
That disappeared within a couple weeks. Gas is up 17% from Trump’s Iran war. Groceries keep climbing. Inflation (3.8%) is now outpacing wage growth (3.6%) for the first time since 2023.
And healthcare? ACA premium tax credits are getting eliminated, and this bill cuts $863 billion from Medicaid, meaning millions pay MORE for coverage or lose it entirely. This costs American lives.
That “tax cut” didn’t survive 1 day with a grocery run, a gas fill-up, and one doctor’s visit.
Now the people who actually got hurt. Households making $20,000 or less LOSE an average of $40 this year, not gain. SNAP dropped 5% in one month alone as this bill slashed $295 billion from food assistance. 65% of SNAP households already lost a deduction worth about $10/month.
Combine lost healthcare, cut food assistance, and rising costs, and the bottom 10% of Americans lose $1,214 a year in total resources.
Meanwhile 60% of all the tax benefits in this bill go to the top 25% of earners who needed the least.
There’s no paycheck bump. That’s a lie, and it shows exactly who this bill was built for. And it’s not you. You’ve added trillions to our national debt with nothing to show for. STOP LYING TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
Distribution of the Tax Cuts
- Putting aside the extension of existing cuts, almost half of households will see an income tax cut of less than $100 in 2026 under the new tax law.
- About 20% of households will see a tax cut of more than $1,000. These households are concentrated in the upper-middle income range.
Please consider Distribution of the Tax Cuts in Current Law
Most of the tax cuts in the OBBBA were simply an extension of the tax code that was in place for 2025. If households think about tax changes on a year-over-year basis, rather than a counterfactual basis, then they may not “feel” the impact of the new tax law unless they benefit from one of the new tax breaks, like the “no tax on…” tax breaks or the higher cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions. Therefore, looking at tax cuts against a current policy baseline—that is, how much taxes changed above and beyond TCJA extension—helps us understand how much tax relief taxpayers will receive over and above the post-2017 status quo.
That analysis and some excellent charts is from last year.
But thanks to Trump’s press secretary for bringing up the lies again.
These charts paint a one-sided view of reality. How much do the top 25% spend to bribe Congress to give themselves tax breaks versus the bottom 75%? How much do the top 25% pay to run advertisements on Fox to con the gullible into thinking the top 25% need tax breaks, versus the bottom 75%?
The wealthy invest their hard-earned money into making tax cuts happen! Without them the bottom 75% takers wouldn’t get any tax cuts. Losers need to learn a little gratitude to their betters.
For vast majority of families it is a tax cut lower than $1000 combined with $2000 increase in living costs due to import tariffs.
Beautiful.
Do you want a tax cut? Pay double for it and White House keeps the half to finance war against Iran.
Gasoline price?
White House: Oh, yeah, well, hmmmm, it is not our fault. But look we are winning.
Tax “cuts” without spending cuts are tax/shifts/.
A week after those cuts, ZH headline mentioned that the currency devaluation in that week already increased gas prices and ate the cut for the lowest tax brackets.
Republicans have already bailed out farmers with $44.3 billion of our money over the past year because of Trump’s policies and now want to give them $11.1 billion more for a total of $55.4 billion but the vast majority vote Republican because they are against socialism.
Well look at Stu for example. Everyone should suffer except for the favored classes. That’s all the GOP knows how to argue, despite the classes they’re supposedly supporting being rear ended nonstop. All those poor people who voted the GOP in can go get screwed I guess.
They aren’t against socialism. They’re against socialism for non-white people.
Farmers are rough and ready when it comes to intellectual matters. They will take money when they can get it. But they inevitably have to think, reason, and problem-solve far more than city people ever have to, so you won’t ever find them good reliable socialists. That’s why the Russian Communists killed off the kulaks.
Working Class (Some) Americans did in fact experience a paycheck bump. They received a “Taxpayer Check” every month for the entire year, of roughly $65.00 per Month. That’s the facts, so let’s not get caught up on things that happened after or before the facts, as an excuse for more.
I may have an additional idea. Let’s understand first, that Households earning less than $25,000 per year tend to have higher rates of tobacco use, with approximately 32.2% of adults in this income bracket using tobacco products.
In contrast, alcohol consumption patterns can vary, but excessive drinking is often more prevalent among lower-income groups as well. Same situation here as well.
Maybe toss a bunch of that money at stopping the problem, and rewarding those who do, instead of simply tossing “Taxpayer Money” at the problem, that then never gets fixed, because you enabled it to continue.
So include alcohol and smoking forbidden to stay on these programs. That’s not where our Tax Dollars should go, ever! Figure out the details and make it work.
Now you will have decreased cost to the TaxPayers of America. Only serious people on the program’s, and they will be helped.
You have saved on potential Healthcare Charges, Hospital Stays, Medicines, State assistance etc. as well as healthier Americans and less Hard Earned tax payer $ going out the door for nothing.
Food for thought
More British nanny state bullshit from the party of individual rights everyone! Remember, that thing the Republicans used to stand for?
Hey, Stu-pid, why are they all drinking and smoking so much? Let’s see you form a thought on this one. Could there be a link? Could they be… miserable?
(To those reading: Get ready to watch as our favorite “individual rights republican” tries to explain how the poor should just keep working, eat cake, shut up and be happy!)
You mean Sean Hannity? The Wallbanger, as Michael Savage used to call him?
Once you vote in a known rapist for president, every victim is just someone to blame.
Don’t forget that anyone that lives in a poorly-run/high-property-and-income-tax state is benefitting at the expense of those who live in lower property/income tax states thanks to the resumption of allowing deductions of up to 40k. And you can make f tons of money to deduct it too.
So if you’re lucky enough to live in a state that doesn’t have insane taxes, relatively speaking, then you’re also unlucky enough to qualify for writing off more income.
That disparity isn’t really top 1% as the article focused on but moreso on the continued bailout of states that most mismanage their budget at the expense of the better run, where better is definitely relative since none of them are particularly good at it. Complain about California’s budget? Well, no matter, the OBBA will grace their citizens with bigger federal tax offsets. Sure, they are stung with the higher state tax but why the federal giveaway? That should sit solely on their shoulders not mine.
Other comments here yet again showing why wins for the DSA will just keep rolling in. It is never enough for the upper middle class top 20-10%. Funny enough, most of this group is old as shit and is coasting on where they got when times were good.
Work two jobs in fast food? Well guess what? Grandpa says you should go get a real job! The kind that doesn’t exist because Grandpa’s generation ran the nation into the dirt and got rich moving your jobs to India (and moving the Indians here, but that’s TOTALLY DIFFERENT from Mexicans okay??). You’re starving and can’t afford medicine? Too bad!
By the way, Grandpa is going to need another eleventy trillion in govt debt to cover his Medicare so you can get a “real” job wiping his senile 75 year old ass. If you’re under 50, you should obviously be thanking his generation for this wonderful future and if you want the money back from him you’re a communist.
Wait, why are all the kids today communists who hate the elderly? That’s weird. They must be ungrateful.
Hang in there, they’ll all be dead by 2070.
boomer here. i agree with you. since the ww2 generation, came back from ww2 and were handed profound and large government help delivered by the ww1 generation. the boomers, shit on their kids(sent them off to nam), who shit on their kids(sent them off to iraq……..). crumbling evil empire 101. thing will come apart. like all empires before ours.
Your angle on this is spot on. I don’t want what the DSA is selling but anger needs a home and both parties better wise up and start doing the right thing or that’s where the next populism/activism goes–toward the total failure of socialism. How does it unwind? By removing the socialistic portions of our bastardized capitalism. Remove moral hazard, stop tilting the scales…or the hazards are coming and it’ll be more than scales that are tipped. The pitchforks and torches of an angry mob will come…it won’t fix a dang thing but, anger needs a home. And it’ll happen before the party that is pandering to it (D’s) can do anything to stop the extremist policies they’ll demand as their pound of flesh.
Let me tell you how I’d do it if I ran for office. No more handouts for businesses. None, zlich, zip. Go bankrupt? Goodbye then. Too big to fail has bled this nation out.
Laws we have on the books would actually be enforced, and I’d be happy to pack and investigate the rotten ass supreme court to do it. No more foreign influence ops from Israel and Russia in the open, anyone found doing it will be tried for treason. Fraudsters will be sold up the river expeditiously no matter who they are related to. The military? Cut down to size, it ain’t doing anything useful. Let the fuckers pass an audit for once, then they can have their money.
Once that’s done, let’s fix people sucking down the public handouts where it happens in the middle. Healthcare for all will be funded with the cash we take from the fraudsters running private healthcare now, we have proof this works so there’s no reason not to do it. SNAP? Funded with the subsidies corn don’t need no more. Handouts for farmers will now be funded with what we get back from corporate grifters buying all the farmland up.
All of this unwinds by taking the money from crooks and feeding it back into small businesses and innovators. Fix copyright laws to let smart people own their work outright, no more squatting on patents.
Hard workers (blue and white collar) get rewarded, grifters get nothing, thieves go to jail. That’s the recipe that fixes this nation.
And additionally, no more culture war bullshit. Guy wants to be a chick? I don’t give a shit. Guy wants to marry a dude? Who cares. Woman wants an abortion? It’s her body.
Let’s let adults be adults again. People want to know why kids are stupid and then treat anyone under 30 like they’re babies. 18 year olds should be able to drink, smoke, and do whatever else. They can vote and buy a gun, but they can’t live on their own or rent a car? Makes no sense.
We’ve let this nation hit rock bottom by letting nanny state biddies shout over people with brains. You can’t bring up real issues without some smooth brained slopehead screaming about MUH WOMUMS SPORPS!!! Who cares? We’re all too fucking poor to afford groceries, genuinely who in the real world is busy fixating on fucking sports? Let states sort that shit out if they care so much. The federal government shouldn’t be for petty squabbles.
Finally, a tax cut for me, an upper middle class person. For the record my family works for a living, just like low income families do. So why can’t we get a tax cut just like they have gotten under Dems?
Note the SNAP class is essentially the free loader class of Welfare people. I don’t feel sorry that life got tougher for them since they aren’t contributing anything work wise. Maybe it will spur some of them to get actual jobs.
Hard work and productivity are incentivized. Laziness and welfare free-riding (at least by the lower classes) are disincentivized. That’s the best thing I can say about Trump’s whole package.
But a conservative government can do that without Trump.
He brings massive personal defects and consequences to that table. There are massive problems unaddressed or aggravated.
Well any government aid poor people get go strait back into the economy. Food assistances supports grocery stores / farmers etc. dont forget taxes. You should aid your anger upwards. Where a tax break creates wealth for wealthy. Who feed that wealth back into the political system so they can aquire more wealth.
It’s not the wealth that’s the problem. I mean whether Elon has 100 billion or 1 trillion he can only eat 1 steak at a time and drive 1 car etc. There’s an argument to be made that money concentrated in the wealthy keeps prices down since it keeps demand down (look at what happened when free money was given away during Covid, demand (cars, real estate, goods) skyrocketed and so did prices since no more supply could come online).
It’s the power that wealth brings that lets those people dictate to the rest of us how things will be that is the issue.
True the way i see it if you spend 180 million on elections. You can afford to pay more in taxes.
Or stop breeding. On 2nd thought, nah, it won’t.
Correct as long as illegals can stream in, stop breeding won’t help.
Do you realize that nearly 40% of Snap recipients are children and nearly 20% are elderly? Combined that 60% of the Snap recipients. Not sure how much “contributing” to society you want from those two groups. I guess we can have those kids start working on those iPhones Trump is going to bring back to the USA.
The view from afar is it seems no one really cares about the people, like many places politicians and elites only care about the welfare of their class. About the same in most western countries, however what ever the short comings America always seem to offer hope or the strength to deal with its short comings.
Not sure there is way out with Trump.
Those of the elite who got there by using their brains may well care about the other classes. However, the hard part for you to accept is that because of their intellectual ability, they also know that most of what you think you know is wrong. So you won’t find them agreeing with your shallow ideas.
The tax cuts left the US with an unsustainable structural fiscal deficit of about 8 percent of GDP. Trump has now a very good chance to go down in history as the first US president that literally bankrupted the country. A fiscal crisis takes a long time to materialize, but Trump and the Republicans have created the ideal conditions for one to happen. The funny thing is that the Democrats seem to be rather blasé about the risk.
Well that’s an easy question to answer when you think about it. Both parties post robber baron Reagan have been pleased as punch to rob the public coffers to pay for everything from transforming the US into a corporate socialist state to bloating our military into a complete and utter joke.
The best part? No accountability exists anywhere for this. Republicans are free to ask for 1.5 trillion dollars to feed a military that couldn’t find its own ass, and Democrats are free to do the same for the next program that directly funnels taxpayer money into banks so they can commit even MORE fraud than last time. I find it incredibly ironic that the budding “socialist” movement seems to be the only political faction that cares aside from dinosaurs like Massie and Paul.
They don’t care any more than the others. They just want it to be ‘their turn’ to loot the public coffers for their causes, friends and family.
So you instead spend the rest of this thread arguing that poor people should just be thankful for what they have now instead. Wonderful, let’s see how that flies come midterms grandpa.
Yeah the deficits only happend under Trump. None of those previous ones counted I guess. Not defending him but I’m pretty sure the author of this blog has written numerous times about economics and deficits over the years; 12 of the last 18 years were under Democrat Administrations. The Democrats aren’t blase` about the risk, they are right there front and center approving every last deficit whether in the minority or majority.
America ain’t prepared to take on one bit of fiscal pain–every time a whiff comes by in the air, the gas pedal of fiscal and monetary stimulus via deficits is hammered down.
With this level of debt and continued deficits and the demographic…this is and was always going to happen. Put a D in office in 2028, it’ll persist. How you propose we right the ship–remove the OBBA provisions? Let them expire. K, then what? Why didn’t Biden set us on a path, fully explained, to the promised land of surpluses and fiscal stability. Rand Paul brings it up constantly..goes nowhere. Haven’t met an American yet that would stomach it. We bitch about $4.00 gas, what would the pain points reach with a massive spending reduction? The deficit of the government has been the surplus of American citizens and the rest of the world. I’m okay with it but are you?
Taco takes care of himself, family and billionaire “acquaintances.” The rest can “eat cake.”
Let’s not forget that inflation is the worst tax of all, that it is highly regressive, and that it is entirely the fault of government, which is simply successful organized crime.
I beg to differ. If there’s one difference between the government and organized crime, it’s that one of them is organized.
Inflation might be based on redistribution of wealth: printing and handing out money. The current wave of inflation is based on frictions and shocks on supply, based on one man’s choices about tariffs, labor supply (immigration) and war. If this resulted in a manufacturing renaissance in the USA that hired otherwise low-income local people, it might be acceptable as a sort of tax for that project. But that seems not to have materialized.
“The current wave of inflation is based on frictions and shocks on supply, based on one man’s choices about tariffs, labor supply (immigration) and war.”
No. You are confusing causes and effects. Inflation is when the money supply is inflated. If there is not a corresponding increase in the supply of goods and services the money can be exchanged for, then you’re inevitably going to experience price increases. You can thank the Federal Reserve, which is as “federal” as Federal Express, and which has no reserve, for those price increases.
The stuff you’re blaming the Orange Julius Caesar for (and I agree with you) is causing prices to increase because it is changing the supply and demand curves for those items. Oil prices go up because the supply is being affected by what FUCKYOUDONALDTRUMP (FUDT) is doing. Prices of everything that needs oil to be brought to market are going up because energy is an input to bring those items to market at one to many points along the supply chain.
The worst tax of all and the most immoral is income tax. It is submission to the government that your income does not belong to you and that it is the benevolence of the government that it lets you keep most of it (for now). It is a disincentive to work and save.
Second worst is property tax. You never really own what you live in/on. Don’t pay property taxes for a few years and find out.
Taxes & Death….. you can run but you can’t hide.
I would reverse the order, but it is a splitting of hairs. I think propery tax is the most egregiously wrong tax for a country that proclaims our basic framework outside of our freedoms is equal protection under the law and private property rights. If I’m paying annually for owning property such that failure to do so removes my right to sell or stay on said property then private property is a myth. At least the concept of an income tax was codified via an amendment to the U.S. Constitution and in theory then could also be repealed by the populace.
Agree 100% property tax is the worst.
It means you can’t choose to ‘live off your land’ since you must generate some kind of income to pay the property tax.
Even worse is that property tax isn’t equal. Some pay more than others for the exact same land or home. Prop 13 for example in Cali (Florida has a similar law) and others get ‘breaks’ on taxes (sports teams in their stadiums) which means everyone else pays more.