This is not true. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was a massive middle-class tax break, and almost every taxpayer in America got a tax cut from it. While the law also cut taxes for the wealthy and for corporations, it actually shifted a greater portion of the tax burden onto wealthier taxpayers.

These are hard facts, publicly available. In fact, the voters whom Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) are trying to reach with their attacks on the TCJA are mostly middle-class taxpayers who benefited from it and who could see that they benefited from it by comparing their 2017 taxes with their 2018 taxes.

So, why do Harris and Walz lie so baldly on such verifiable matters?

Because they can get away with it.

The major news media have always had a bias in favor of higher taxes and in favor of Democrats. The 2017 debate over the TCJA, however, was extraordinary in this regard. The media’s coverage was so misleading and obfuscating that it left millions of people, especially liberal voters who trust the liberal media, believing that their taxes had been increased.

And today, Democrats are trying to cash in on that misinformation campaign of 2017 and 2018.

The tax cut

“I think everyone here knows,” Harris said in her convention speech, “[Trump] doesn’t actually fight for the middle class. … Instead, he fights for himself and his billionaire friends. And he will give them another round of tax breaks.”

This followed Walz’s convention speech, in which he sounded the same note. Walz, before promising Harris would cut middle-class taxes, said Trump’s agenda is one “that serves nobody, except the richest and the most extreme amongst us.”

These are less direct versions of the attack Harris and President Joe Biden have been making for years.

In his 2022 State of the Union address, Biden said, “Unlike the $2 trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefited the top 1% of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people.”

This echoed Harris’s argument in the 2020 vice presidential debate: “Donald Trump, who measures the strength of the economy based on how rich people are doing. Which is why he passed a tax bill benefiting the top 1% and the biggest corporations of America, leading to a $2 trillion deficit that the American people are gonna have to pay for. On Day One, Joe Biden will repeal that tax bill. He’ll get rid of it.”

All of these claims would lead the listener to believe that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did not cut taxes for the middle class and working class. But it did. Most people got a tax cut from the bill, and in the working class and middle class, many saw their federal income taxes drop to zero. They got a 100% cut.

The law increased the standard deduction and the child tax credit while abolishing the personal and dependent exemption. For most families, these changes increased the amount of income taxed at 0%. Married filers with two children before TCJA could earn about $50,000 before owing taxes, while that same family could earn $60,000 tax-free after the law.

Thus, married families of four earning $60,000 saw a 100% federal income tax cut — hardly a tax cut for the rich. More than 4 million households saw their taxes zeroed out, according to the liberal Brookings Institution.

Also, almost every tax bracket saw a rate reduction. The 15% rate was reduced to 12%, 25% to 22%, 28% to 24%, 33% to 32%, and 39.6% to 37%. Percentagewise, those rate reductions were much greater in the lower brackets.

The middle quintile saw an average federal tax cut of $930, according to Brookings.

Of course, taxpayers who pay more in taxes generally saw greater tax savings, dollarwise. (People with higher taxes benefit more from tax cuts.) But because of how many people were taken off the income tax rolls, the TCJA actually shifted a slightly greater portion of the tax burden onto the wealthy. The top 1%, according to the Congressional Budget Office, paid a slightly higher portion of federal taxes in 2018, at 25.9%, than in 2017, at 25.5%, as did the top 20%.

The left-leaning Tax Policy Center estimated that 65% of people got a tax cut, while an additional portion already paid no income tax. Only about 6% faced a tax hike from the bill. The liberal Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy looked at the law’s effect on each income quintile in each state and found that in all 250 groups — upper class to lower class, and Maine to California — the average taxpayer got tax relief from the bill.

“The vast majority of people did get a tax cut,” an analyst at H&R Block’s Tax Institute told the New York Times in 2019.

Yet Democrats consistently and insistently claimed that the middle class and working class did not benefit from the bill. It was a brazen campaign of deceit. Politicians lying en masse is not rare. What’s extraordinary is how well it worked.

Most people, despite all the facts, believed the bill either increased their taxes or at least didn’t give them a tax cut.

Only 33% of adults in one major poll conducted at the time of passage believed the bill was cutting their taxes. In 2019, as people were filing their taxes under the new law for the first time, the New York Times found that only 40% believed the law cut their taxes.

“The Democrats did a very good job” of misleading the public, Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center said.

The error was so widespread that the New York Times had to run a story headlined “Face It: You (Probably) Got a Tax Cut.”

Media manipulation

There’s a telling distinction under the surface here:

Polls showed that Democrats were more likely to be mistaken about the bill. That’s likely because the liberal media joined in the Democrats’ misinformation campaign.

I went on MSNBC in December 2017 to discuss the bill, and CNBC personality Ron Insana, playing a straight reporter, said, “It does not help individuals who are below $100,000. In fact, it probably doesn’t help individuals who are below $200,000, given the analysis we’ve seen thus far. It is not a middle-class tax cut.”

This was Insana misleading his viewers and characterizing dishonest Democratic spin as “the analysis we’ve seen thus far.”

Liberal journalist Matt Yglesias defended Insana on social media: “It’s a fine summary,” Yglesias vented. “You know that it’s a fine summary, you know *why* it’s a fine summary, and you know that I know you know why it’s a fine summary.”

It wasn’t a fine summary. It was partisan propaganda completely divorced from the facts.

After the 2018 midterm elections, Yglesias admitted, “Progressive groups did a really great job convincing people that Trump raised their taxes when the facts say a clear majority got a tax cut.”

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Even now, though, six years after Republicans cut almost everyone’s taxes, Democrats pretend the law was nothing more than a tax cut for the rich.

Why? Well, they figure they can get away with it. And they may be right.