Trump Passed the Tax Cuts. Now He’s Undermining Them.
In the year and a half since President Donald Trump signed the $1.5 trillion Republican tax cut, polling shows that the law has produced two unexpected results.
The first is that, according to most surveys taken before and after the law’s passage, Congress gave the nation an enormous tax cut it didn’t want and hasn’t come to appreciate. The second and far more stunning discovery is that few Americans even believe they got a tax cut—even though about two-thirds of them actually did. In a poll taken in June by the Associated Press and the University of Chicago’s NORC center, nearly twice as many respondents said their tax bill went up as went down in 2018.
The tax law combined a steep permanent reduction in the corporate-tax rate—from 35 to 21 percent—with temporary cuts to personal-income-tax rates. While the GOP cut tax rates at every level, wealthy Americans have disproportionately benefited, have found. The polling suggests, however, that whatever economic success, Republicans lost the political argument on their biggest legislative victory in more than a decade—a defeat that likely helped Democrats regain the House majority in 2018 and could hamper Trump’s ability to claim credit for a strong economy as he seeks reelection next year.
