Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy

Trump-GOP Tax Law

blog  

Top 1% to Receive $1 Trillion Tax Cut from Trump Megabill Over the Next Decade

July 3, 2025 • By Carl Davis

The Trump megabill will give the top 1 percent tax cuts totaling $1.02 trillion over the next decade. For comparison, the bill’s cuts to the Medicaid health care program will total $930 billion over the same period.

blog  

Trump Megabill Will Give $117 Billion in Tax Cuts to the Top 1% in 2026. How Much In Your State?

June 30, 2025 • By Michael Ettlinger

The predominant feature of the tax and spending bill working its way through Congress is a massive tax cut for the richest 1 percent — a $114 billion benefit to the wealthiest people in the country in 2026 alone.

blog  

How Much Do the Top 1% in Each State Get from the Senate Tax Bill?

June 30, 2025 • By Carl Davis

The Senate tax bill under debate right now would bring very large tax cuts to very high-income people. In total, the richest 1 percent would receive $114 billion in tax cuts next year alone. That would amount to nearly $61,000 for each of these affluent households.

report  

Analysis of Tax Provisions in the Senate Reconciliation Bill: National and State Level Estimates

June 25, 2025 • By Carl Davis, Jessica Vela, Joe Hughes, Steve Wamhoff

Compared to its House counterpart, the Senate bill makes certain tax provisions more generous, including corporate tax breaks that it makes permanent rather than temporary. But the bottom line for both is the same. Both bills give more tax cuts to the richest 1 percent than to the entire bottom 60 percent of Americans, and both bills particularly favor high-income people living in more conservative states.

blog  

Senate Republicans Rig the Rules to Make Their Tax Bill Look Responsible. It’s Not.

June 24, 2025 • By Jon Whiten, Steve Wamhoff

No matter how much Senate leadership bends the rules to make their tax cuts look better on paper, the cost and impact on the deficit remains the same under a current policy baseline. It’s a move meant to mask the true cost and push a reckless bill through.

CNBC: How Senate GOP ‘No Tax on Tips’ Proposal Differs From House Republican Plan

June 18, 2025

However, the Senate proposal is different from the House version in two key ways, Matt Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, wrote in an e-mail. Read more.

blog  

Musk-Trump Feud Shows Need to Tax the Rich

June 6, 2025 • By Amy Hanauer

Our tax policies enable people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump to accumulate more wealth than anyone could ever use in a lifetime. They then use it to steer elections and shape public policy to further enrich themselves and others like them. We should defeat the enormously destructive tax bill in Congress and instead craft tax policy that taxes the rich, makes our democracy more fair, and returns resources to the rest of the country.

report  

Analysis of Tax Provisions in the House Reconciliation Bill: National and State Level Estimates

May 22, 2025 • By Carl Davis, Jessica Vela, Joe Hughes, Steve Wamhoff

The poorest fifth of Americans would receive 1 percent of the House reconciliation bill's net tax cuts in 2026 while the richest fifth of Americans would receive two-thirds of the tax cuts. The richest 5 percent alone would receive a little less than half of the net tax cuts that year.

blog  

House Tax Bill Would Encourage Dynastic Wealth Hoarding by Further Weakening the Estate Tax

May 15, 2025 • By Jon Whiten

The sprawling tax and spending bill before the House of Representatives would cut more than $200 billion from food assistance, potentially affecting 4 million children and 7 million adults, while providing an estate tax cut costing roughly the same amount to a few thousand people who will leave behind more than $7 million to their heirs.

brief  

Federal Tax Debate 2025

May 2, 2025 • By ITEP Staff

The tax cuts in the House bill mostly flow to those who have the most. Roughly 68% of the tax cuts go to the richest 20% in the U.S. Some other notable changes would support private school voucher programs, harm immigrant communities, and widen income and racial inequality.

blog  

The Impact of Trump’s Tariffs

April 23, 2025 • By ITEP Staff

The tariffs proposed by Donald Trump, which are far larger than any on the books today, would significantly raise the prices faced by American consumers across the income scale.

blog  

It’s Tax Day. You’ve Paid Your Share, but the Billionaires Haven’t.

April 15, 2025 • By Amy Hanauer

You likely had most of your federal taxes deducted from your paychecks throughout the year. This is not true, however, for mega-millionaires and billionaires, some of whom are practically running our government right now.

blog  

Senate Republicans Rig Congressional Rules to Make Their Tax Cuts Appear Cost-Free

April 4, 2025 • By Steve Wamhoff

This week, members of Congress are arguing about whether extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts would cost trillions of dollars over a decade or cost nothing.

blog  

Trump’s Address to Congress Obscures His Actual Tax Agenda

March 5, 2025 • By Amy Hanauer

In last night’s address to Congress, President Trump spent more time insulting Americans, lying, and bragging than he did talking about taxes. But regardless of what President Trump and Elon Musk talk about most loudly and angrily, there is one clear policy that they and the corporations and billionaires that support them will try hardest […]

blog  

House Budget Resolution Tees Up Damaging Trump Tax Agenda

February 26, 2025 • By Steve Wamhoff

The budget resolution passed by House Republicans will enrich the richest, blow up the deficit, and decimate vital public services. The budget resolution allows Congress to pass reconciliation legislation with $4.5 trillion in tax cuts that would mostly flow to the wealthiest families in the country. Congressional Republicans have no way to pay for the massive tax cuts promised by President Trump during his campaign other than to dismantle fundamental parts of the government and increase the federal budget deficit.

blog  

The Five Biggest Corporations Represented at Trump’s Inauguration Could Save $75 Billion from One Tax Break Before Congress

February 11, 2025 • By Matthew Gardner, Spandan Marasini

New financial reports indicate five of America’s biggest corporations—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Tesla—could win $75 billion in tax breaks if Congress and the President satisfy demands from corporate lobbyists to reinstate a provision repealed under the 2017 Trump tax law.

blog  

Congress Could — But Won’t — Pass a Tax Package That Pays for Itself

January 17, 2025 • By Joe Hughes

If Republican lawmakers were serious about deficit-neutral tax reform, they would focus on increasing taxes for the ultra-wealthy and large corporations. The absence of such proposals in their plan reveals their true priority: delivering enormous tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans while average working families receive crumbs.

brief  

Trump’s Plan to Extend His 2017 Tax Provisions: Updated National and State-by-State Estimates

January 8, 2025 • By Steve Wamhoff

Trump’s plan to make most of the temporary provisions of his 2017 tax law permanent would disproportionately benefit the richest Americans. This includes all major provisions except the $10,000 cap on deductions for state and local taxes (SALT) paid.

report  

A Distributional Analysis of Kamala Harris’ Tax Plan

October 23, 2024 • By Steve Wamhoff

The tax proposals from Vice President Kamala Harris would, on average, lead to a tax increase for the richest 1 percent of Americans and a tax cut for all other income groups.

report  

A Distributional Analysis of Donald Trump’s Tax Plan

October 7, 2024 • By Carl Davis, Erika Frankel, Galen Hendricks, Joe Hughes, Matthew Gardner, Michael Ettlinger, Steve Wamhoff

Former President Donald Trump has proposed a wide variety of tax policy changes. Taken together, these proposals would, on average, lead to a tax cut for the richest 5 percent of Americans and a tax increase for all other income groups.

brief  

Extending Temporary Provisions of the 2017 Trump Tax Law: Updated National and State-by-State Estimates

September 13, 2024 • By Steve Wamhoff

The TCJA Permanency Act would make permanent the provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 that are set to expire at the end of 2025. The legislation would disproportionately benefit the richest Americans. Below are graphics for each state that show the effects of making TCJA permanent across income groups. See ITEP’s […]

blog  

The Quiet Effort to Make Single Parenthood More Expensive

September 9, 2024 • By Carl Davis

After the dust settles on this year’s election, one of the most pressing issues confronting the next Congress and President will be how to deal with the expiration of the 2017 Trump tax cuts and, more specifically, who will pay for the cost of extending some or all of those cuts. Among the more widely accepted ideas circulating on the right is to raise income taxes on single parents, more than four in five of whom are women and a disproportionate share of whom are people of color.

report  

Corporate Taxes Before and After the Trump Tax Law

May 2, 2024 • By Matthew Gardner, Michael Ettlinger, Spandan Marasini, Steve Wamhoff

The Trump tax law slashed taxes for America’s largest, consistently profitable corporations. These companies saw their effective tax rates fall from an average of 22.0 percent to an average of 12.8 percent after the Trump tax law went into effect in 2018.

blog  

Biden Is Right: Corporate Tax Avoidance Has Big Problems That We Can Fix

April 1, 2024 • By Jon Whiten

Sensible reforms to the corporate tax system can help both crack down on corporate tax avoidance and ensure companies that are flourishing are paying their share for the public infrastructure that forms the building blocks of their success.

report  

Revenue-Raising Proposals in President Biden’s Fiscal Year 2025 Budget Plan

March 12, 2024 • By Steve Wamhoff

President Biden’s most recent budget plan includes proposals that would raise more than $5 trillion from high-income individuals and corporations over a decade. Like the budget plan he submitted to Congress last year, it would partly reverse the Trump tax cuts for corporations and high-income individuals, clamp down on corporate tax avoidance, and require the wealthiest individuals to pay taxes on their capital gains income just as they are required to for other types of income, among other reforms.