Senate Republicans’ tax plan raises taxes on families earning less than $75,000

Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation (basically the Congressional Budget Office for tax policy) is out with a fresh distributional analysis of the Senate version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and the news is great if you happen to earn more than $500,000 or so per year.

For those of more modest means, however, the news is not so good. By 2027, after most of the individual cuts in the bill expire (and the corporate cuts remain), households earning between $75,000 and $100,000 will see, on average, no tax cut. And households earning less than $75,000 per year will see, on average, a tax increase.

Lily Batchelder, a tax professor at NYU who used to be the chief tax counsel for the Senate Finance Committee, has the chart:

For context, the median household income in the United States is $55,000.

Per the JCT’s tables, about 65 percent of households fall into the categories that are expecting tax increases, while about 24 percent are in the privileged group that will have its taxes cut.

This analysis does leave out a few things — including the repeal of the estate tax (good for rich people) and the impact of increased insurance premiums flowing from the repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate (bad for the poor and the middle class). But overall, the shape is clear — most people are paying higher taxes, and the rich are paying less.

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