The word “transparency” certainly does not describe President Donald Trump’s second administration. Whereas during his first term, for example, transcriptions of all of his remarks were published, a HuffPost analysis found that less than a quarter of his speeches, press conferences and media availabilities have been transcribed for posterity four months into his second term.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that earlier this week the White House published evidence that the president’s “big, beautiful bill” hikes taxes on the poor to cut taxes for the rich.
In 2029, Americans making less than $30,000 will actually pay more in taxes under the GOP’s plan than under current law.
On a page entitled “ICYMI: ‘Average earners’ tax bills would fall under House tax package, forecasters say,’” the White House includes a link with the text “Click here to see the official analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation.” (Update: After publication, the link to the JCT’s analysis stopped working. You can access an archived version of the analysis here.) The Joint Committee on Taxation is a nonpartisan committee that, among other duties, produces distribution tables breaking down how different income levels will be impacted by new tax laws.
As Aaron Fritschner, chief of staff to Democratic Rep. Don Beyer, pointed out, the JCT report that the White House itself touted includes a rather unflattering data point about its tax plan — at least regarding some of the most vulnerable taxpayers.
In 2029, Americans making less than $30,000 will actually pay more in taxes under the GOP’s plan than under current law. Americans making less than $15,000 — the poorest of the poor — will pay 53% more in taxes than they do now as their average tax rate jumps from 3.3% to 5.1%. Meanwhile, households making over a million will pay 6.4% less in taxes (totaling an estimated $74 billion collectively), as their average rate falls from 30.8% to 28.7%.
Americans making over $30,000 will get a tax cut, according to the JCT. But those numbers, as Brendan Duke of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, do not include other tax law changes such as the higher threshold for the estate tax, or the cuts to programs like SNAP and Medicaid that primarily benefit the poor, or the effects of the president’s tariffs. When you add those, the benefits of the Republican bill become even more skewed towards the richest Americans. In fact, the New York Times reports that economists at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, another nonpartisan outfit, “found that many Americans who make less than $51,000 a year would see their after-tax income fall as a result of the Republican proposal beginning in 2026.”
The White House prefers to highlight the JCT’s estimates for 2027, when only Americans making less than $15,000 face a tax increase and decreases across the board are higher. This is because the current GOP bill front-loads a bunch of temporary new tax breaks. And while the cuts most generous to the wealthy (such as the higher estate tax threshold) are permanent, other cuts, such as the “senior bonus” that replaces Trump’s promise of “no tax on Social Security,” expire just days before the end of Trump’s term. How effective such time-limited cuts would be is questionable. Don’t take it from me: Adam Michel, the director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, dismissed the short-term cuts as “simply giveaways to targeted demographics.”
But for a brief window, Trump and company can pretend their bill helps everyone — assuming you don’t count those cuts to Medicaid SNAP, or the sweeping tariffs that, no matter how much Trump insists otherwise, are taxes.
For the moment, the GOP’s mega-bill is stalled after five Republicans voted against advancing it out of the House Budget Committee Friday. The committee is set to reconvene late Sunday evening. But don’t get your hopes up: the holdouts were more conservative representatives who want even more spending cuts to programs like Medicaid. For them, poor Americans’ suffering isn’t a budgetary bug; it’s a feature.
