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Mar 5, 2024 · To comply with congressional budget rules, Republicans could not make all of the 2017 law’s tax cuts permanent, so they prioritized making the less-popular corporate tax changes permanent to avoid having to debate those cuts when the other provisions expired.
- Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Overview
- Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Passage
- Personal Taxes
- Itemized Deductions
- Business Taxes
- Growth and Budgetary Impacts
- The Oil Addendum
- Automatic Spending Cuts
- Who Benefited from Tcja?
- Did Cutting Corporate Taxes Boost The Economy?
President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law on December 22, 2017, bringing sweeping changes to the tax code. Reaction to it varied based on a wide range of factors, including public opinion of Trump's presidency. Individually, the impact of the changes depended on details like income level, filing status, and deductions. Those living ...
The Senate passed the bill on December 2, 2017, by a party-line vote of 51 to 49. The House successfully passed the bill later that month by a vote of 224 to 201. No House Democrats supported the bill and 12 Republicans voted no—most of them representing California, New York, and New Jersey. Taxpayers who itemized deductions in these high-tax state...
Income Tax Rates
The law retained the old structure of seven individual income tax brackets, but in most cases, it lowered the rates. The top rate fell from 39.6% to 37%, while the 33% bracket dropped to 32%, the 28% bracket to 24%, the 25% bracket to 22%, and the 15% bracket to 12%. The lowest bracket remained at 10%, and the 35% bracket was also unchanged.The income bands that the new rates applied to are lower, compared to 2018 brackets under current law, for the five highest brackets. The changes are temp...
Standard Deduction
The law raised the standard deductionin 2018 to: 1. $24,000 from $12,700 for married couples filing jointly($27,700 in the 2023 tax year) 2. $12,000 from $6,350 for single filers($13,850 in the 2023 tax year) 3. $18,000 from $9,350 for heads of household($20,800 for the 2023 tax year) The additional standard deduction, which the House bill would have repealed, has not been affected. In 2019, the inflation gauge used to index the standard deduction changed in a way that is likely to accelerate...
Personal Exemption and Health Care Mandate
The law suspended the personal exemption, which was $4,150, through 2025. The law also ended the individual mandate, a provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare that provided tax penalties for individuals who did not obtain health insurance coverage, in 2019. (While the mandate technically remains in place, the penalty falls to $0 for tax years 2019 and beyond. If a taxpayer files a prior year's tax return (i.e., 2018 or 2017) the taxpayer will still be exposed to a penalty for...
Mortgage Interest Deduction
The law limited the application of the mortgage interestdeduction for married couples filing jointly to $750,000 worth of debt, down from $1,000,000 under the old law, but up from $500,000 under the House bill. Mortgages that are taken out before December 15, 2017, are still subject to the current cap. The change expires after 2025.
State and Local Tax Deduction
The new law capped the deduction for state and local taxes at $10,000 through 2025.A number of Republican members of Congress representing high-tax states opposed attempts to eliminate the deduction, as the Senate bill would have done. The Senate bill was amended on December 1, 2017, apparently to win Susan Collins' (R-Maine) support:
Pease Limitation
The law repeals the Pease limitation on itemized deductions. This provision did not cap itemized deductions but gradually reduced their value when adjusted gross income exceeds a certain threshold—$266,700 for single filers in 2018.The reduction was limited to 80% of the deductions' combined value.
Corporate Tax Rate
The law created a single corporate tax rate of 21% and repealed the corporate AMT.Unlike tax breaks for individuals, these provisions do not expire. Combined with state and local taxes, the statutory rate under the new law is 26.5%. That puts the U.S. just below the weighted average for EU countries (26.9%). U.S. companies' effective tax rate defined as the tax paid on investments earning the market rate of return after taxes—was 18.6% in 2012, according to the Congressional Budget Office.Tha...
Immediate Expensing
The law allowed full expensing of short-lived capital investments rather than requiring them to be depreciated over time—for five years—but phase the change out by 20 percentage points per year thereafter. The section 179deduction cap doubles to $1 million, and phaseout begins after $2.5 million of equipment spending, up from $2 million.
Pass-Through Income
Owners of pass-through businesses—which include sole proprietorships, partnerships, and S-corporations—gained a 20% deduction for pass-through income. Certain industries, including health, law, and financial services, were excluded from the preferential rate unless taxable income is below $157,500 for single filers. To discourage high earners from recharacterizingregular wages as pass-through income, the deduction is capped at 50% of wage income or 25% of wage income plus 2.5% of the cost of...
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claimed that the Republican tax plan would spur sufficient economic growth to pay for itself and more, saying of the "Unified Framework" released by Senate, House, and Trump administration negotiators in September 2017: The idea that cutting taxes boosts growth to the extent that government revenue actually increas...
The continuing resolution that authorized the use of reconciliation to reform the tax code permitted the Senate Finance Committee to pass legislation increasing the federal budget by up to $1.5 trillion over 10 years. That same budget resolution tasked the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee with achieving at least $1 trillion in savings ...
The idea of a fiscal trigger, a mechanism to enact automatic tax hikes or spending cuts that some senators pushed for in case optimistic growth forecasts did not come to fruition, was rejected on procedural grounds. The law could potentially lead to automatic spending cuts anyway. However, as a result of the 2010 Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act, that l...
According to a December 2017 analysis released by the Tax Policy Center (TPC), the law was expected to raise the after-tax income of 80.4% of households in 2018, but that cut was not distributed evenly or progressively. The analysis revealed that the tax break would hit 93.7% of taxpayers in the highest-earning quintile, and only 53.9% of those in ...
In his Indiana speech of 2018, Trump said that cutting the top corporate tax rate would cause jobs to "start pouring into our country, as companies start competing for American labor and as wages start going up at levels that you haven't seen in many years." The "biggest winners will be the everyday American workers," he added. The next day, The Wa...
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was the largest corporate tax reform in a generation, lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, temporarily allowing full expensing for short-lived assets (referred to as bonus depreciation), and overhauling the international tax code. 6 min read
Jun 14, 2018 · On December 22, 2017, Donald Trump signed into law the biggest tax overhaul since the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The new tax law makes substantial changes to the rates and bases of both the ...
Mar 4, 2024 · March 4, 2024. The corporate tax cuts that President Donald J. Trump signed into law in 2017 have boosted investment in the U.S. economy and delivered a modest pay bump for workers, according to ...
Jan 20, 2019 · President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law, ushering in the largest package of tax cuts and reforms in American history. These tax cuts are delivering real results for American families and workers. More than 6 million workers received tax cut bonuses and benefits. More than 100 utility companies have announced lower rates.
TAX POLICY CENTER | URBAN INSTITUTE & BROOKINGS INSTITUTION 1 On December 22, 2017, Donald Trump signed into law the biggest tax overhaul since the Tax Reform Act of 1986. This paper summarizes the provisions of the bill—commonly referred to as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)—and provides a preliminary analysis of its effects.1
