Middle-class Americans thrived under Trump’s tax cuts. Here’s the proof.



As the 2025 fiscal cliff approaches, key provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are set to expire — triggering one of the largest planned tax hikes in U.S. history. If Congress fails to act, the hardest hit won’t be billionaires or Wall Street elites. It will be working- and middle-class Americans who will get hammered.

For years, the left has pushed a false narrative about the TCJA, passed in 2017 under President Donald Trump. They claim it was a “giveaway to the rich.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) even labeled it a “wealth transfer” from working families to millionaires and billionaires. That claim is flatly untrue. The data from the Internal Revenue Service tells a very different story.

Democrats say they care about working families. If that’s true, why are they standing in the way of the very law that lowered the tax burden on millions of middle-income Americans?

A new policy study from the Heartland Institute, which I co-authored, analyzed IRS data from 2017 through 2022 to evaluate the real impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Although the law passed in 2017, it didn’t take effect until 2018. Using the most recent available tax year (2022), we compared data before and after the law took effect to determine how much taxpayers saved across each IRS income bracket.

Since IRS data for 2023 and 2024 isn’t available yet, we used historical averages to project savings for those years.

Big tax cuts for the middle class

The results are clear. The TCJA cut personal income tax rates across the board. But the biggest winners — by percentage saved — were working- and middle-class Americans earning between $30,000 and $200,000 a year. Over the period studied, these families saved thousands.

Here’s the breakdown: From 2018 through 2024, we project that households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 saved around $6,300 in federal income taxes. Those making between $75,000 and $100,000 saved about $8,300. And families earning between $100,000 and $200,000 saved nearly $13,500.

That’s not a giveaway to the rich. That’s real relief for working families.

While high-income earners benefited too, their relief was modest compared to the savings middle-class families received.

In 2022, filers making between $5 million and $10 million saw their federal tax bills fall by just 2.3% compared to 2017. Meanwhile, households earning between $40,000 and $50,000 saved nearly 19%. That’s not trickle-down economics — that’s targeted relief for working Americans.

Overall, the income groups that saw the largest percentage tax cuts were those earning less than $75,000. Within that group, even the lowest-performing bracket — households making between $50,000 and $75,000 — still saved a little over 16% in 2022 compared to pre-TCJA levels. Every other bracket in the under-$75,000 range saved at least 18%.

Perhaps most striking of all, our study shows that the TCJA actually made the federal tax code more progressive. It shifted more of the income tax burden onto high earners while easing it for working families — the very opposite of what critics have claimed.

The IRS data from 2017 to 2022 shows a clear trend. After the TCJA took effect, households earning less than $200,000 paid a smaller share of all personal income taxes, while households earning more than $200,000 picked up a larger portion of the national tab.

Debunking the deficit myth

This contradicts a favorite claim of the left — that the Trump tax cuts would drain federal revenue and explode the deficit. Yes, the deficit has worsened since the TCJA took effect, but not because tax revenues collapsed. The truth is just the opposite.

In 2017, the IRS collected about $3.5 trillion in total taxes. By 2022, that number had jumped to nearly $5 trillion. Personal income tax collections alone reached $2.13 trillion in 2022 — up half a trillion dollars since the TCJA became law.

The TCJA didn’t starve the Treasury. Federal income tax revenues have grown significantly since 2017. What has fueled the national debt and deficit is not a lack of revenue, but out-of-control government spending.

The clock is ticking

Middle-class tax relief is scheduled to expire at the end of the year. If Congress fails to act, the fallout will be severe. Many middle-income families could face tax hikes of 18% or more, costing them thousands of dollars over the next few years. Higher earners would face even steeper increases — an economic drag that would ripple across the entire country.

Democrats say they care about working families. If that’s true, why are they standing in the way of the very law that lowered the tax burden on millions of middle-income Americans? Why are they trying to undo the progress that helped working people climb the economic ladder?

The answer is plain: politics. Democrats have opposed the TCJA from the beginning — not because it failed, but because Donald Trump signed it into law.

But the facts don’t lie. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act worked. It lowered tax rates, fueled economic growth, and helped everyday Americans keep more of what they earned.

If Congress doesn’t step in soon and make the cuts permanent, the middle class will once again be left holding the bill.

Judge Blocking Trump’s Deportation Of Foreign Nationals Donated To Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren

The Democrat judge attempting to block President Donald Trump’s termination of a Biden-era immigration program previously donated to President Barack Obama and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s respective political campaigns, The Federalist has learned. On Monday, District Court Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, issued a stay on the Trump administration’s efforts to terminate the legal […]

Senate confirms Trump's top military pick in overnight vote



The Senate confirmed retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan Caine to serve as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Friday during an overnight vote.

Caine was confirmed in a 60-25 vote after President Donald Trump abruptly fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. in February. Although his confirmation was bipartisan, several Democratic senators, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, protested his nomination in light of Brown's firing.

'Under President Trump, we are putting in place new leadership that will focus our military on its core mission of deterring, fighting and winning wars.'

Even still, 16 Democrats joined Republicans to confirm Caine right before Congress' two-week recess.

"General Caine is an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a 'warfighter' with significant interagency and special operations experience," Trump said in a Truth Social post.

"During my first term, Razin [Caine] was instrumental in the complete annihilation of the ISIS caliphate," Trump added. "It was done in record setting time, a matter of weeks. Many so-called military 'geniuses' said it would take years to defeat ISIS. General Caine, on the other hand, said it could be done quickly, and he delivered."

Trump credited Caine for his prior military experience and "America First" worldview, which Secretary Pete Hegseth has also embraced in his role heading the Department of Defense.

"General Caine embodies the warfighter ethos and is exactly the leader we need to meet the moment," Hegseth said in a statement. "I look forward to working with him."

"Under President Trump, we are putting in place new leadership that will focus our military on its core mission of deterring, fighting and winning wars," Hegseth added.

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ACKtually it's not racist to call the fake Indian white lady 'Pocahontas'

Donald Trump made history again this week by giving the longest speech by any president to a joint session of Congress. Democrats also made history with their sad display of performative outrage, the worst of its kind since 2020, when party leaders protested racism by wearing African kente cloth and kneeling together in a socially distanced formation.

The post ACKtually it's not racist to call the fake Indian white lady 'Pocahontas' appeared first on .

Trump’s Joint Address Was The Aggressively Partisan Confrontation America Needed

Making it clear which party opposes or is in favor of what is the only way to make these presidential speech moments still useful

Democrats exposed their own HATE during Trump’s speech



Love him or hate him, President Donald Trump came out swinging during his first address to a joint session of Congress — touting all his success in his first month and a half as president and laying out a clear path toward America’s future.

However, while Trump was met with a warm welcome by those on the right, the left was incapable of masking its fury.

This was made clear when the president put a 13-year-old brain cancer survivor — who has always wanted to be a policeman — on the center stage. The boy, DJ Daniel, was given a badge and made an honorary member of the Secret Service.

“The chamber erupted,” Glenn Beck of “The Glenn Beck Program” says, caveating, “at least half of it did.”


“The real story, I think that we have to talk about, is the planned coordinated action, or reaction, or inaction of the Democrats. It was unbelievable. Unbelievable. They just sat there, some with their union-printed signs or dressed in all pink for some unknown reason. Some kind of statement that nobody knew about or really honestly cared,” Glenn says.

“They just sat there, almost throughout the entire thing without moving. When Trump spoke of bringing the hostages back from Gaza, Americans reunited with their families, you would think everybody in the chamber would be like, ‘OK, that was good.’ Nope, not any movement from the Democrats, not a clap, not a twitch,” he continues.

“When he turned to Ukraine, he looked right at them and said, ‘You want to keep this going on for another five years?’ And Elizabeth Warren actually shouted ‘Yes!’ What kind of madness is that?” he asks.

Democratic Rep. Al Green from Texas also disrupted the speech, standing up and screaming over the president while waving his cane.

“He was just screaming, ‘You don’t have a mandate!’” Glenn explains. “Then Speaker Johnson, again here, I’ve never seen it before, he stands up twice and says, ‘Decorum, you are out of order.’ And Al Green just would not sit down. He kept shouting.”

“At first, the other Democrats were shouting with him. The second time, Mike Johnson stood up and said, ‘I’m going to call the sergeant of arms, this is your last warning,’” he continues, noting that when Green kept going, the sergeant of arms escorted him out.

“It’s a first. I mean, I looked all night trying to search the records. I could find no comparisons to this in the modern age,” he adds.

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