New York Times: $111 Billion in Tax Cuts for the Top 1 Percent

Think of it this way: Income inequality has soared in recent decades, with the wealthy pulling away from everyone else and the upper-middle-class doing better than the working class or poor. Yet our federal government has responded by aggravating these trends. It has handed huge tax cuts to the small segment of Americans who need those tax cuts the least.

“Most Americans would look at that and say ‘That’s not fair, and that’s not the result that we wanted from our lawmakers,’ ” says Steve Wamhoff of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington research group that conducted the new study. Polls support his argument. The Trump tax cut still isn’t popular with voters.

For their analysis, Wamhoff and his colleague Matthew Gardner tallied all of the major federal tax cuts and tax increases since 2000. Cumulatively, the top 1 percent of earners have received 22 percent of all tax cuts during that period; the top 20 percent of earners (those earning more than $111,000) have received 65 percent of tax cuts. Read more

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