DEBATENATE

Topics / Economy

The challenge

“Tax cuts only help the rich”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. The twenty seventeen tax cuts reached most American families. The child tax credit doubled from one thousand to two thousand dollars a kid. The standard deduction nearly doubled. The Tax Policy Center found a large majority of households got a tax cut. You'll say the rich got more dollars. Of course they did. The top one percent pay about forty percent of all federal income tax. You can't cut a tax without cutting it for the people who pay it. That's arithmetic, not favoritism. And notice the assumption hiding under your claim, that your paycheck belongs to Washington first and you get to keep what's left. Let me ask you this: if a single mom keeps two thousand more dollars for her two kids, does that stop counting because a millionaire saved too? A tax cut isn't a handout. It's your own money staying home.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. The twenty seventeen law put real money in the pockets of ordinary families, parents most of all.

    The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act doubled the child tax credit from one thousand to two thousand dollars per child and nearly doubled the standard deduction.

  2. The cut was broad, not narrow. Most households paid less.

    The Tax Policy Center's analysis of the final 2017 law estimated that a large majority of households would receive a tax cut in 2018.

  3. You can't cut income taxes without a big share of the dollars going to the people who pay most of the income tax. That's arithmetic, not favoritism.

    IRS Statistics of Income data show the top one percent of earners pay roughly forty percent or more of all federal individual income taxes.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: The 2017 tax cuts added to the deficit, so working families will end up paying for the rich's tax break later.

Nate: The cuts weren't paid for. The Congressional Budget Office said they'd add close to two trillion dollars to deficits over ten years, even counting growth. So cut spending. You don't balance the budget by taking the child tax credit back from a family of four.

What he grants the other side

In raw dollars, higher earners got the bigger cuts.

The lines

Sources

  1. U.S. Congress, Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Public Law 115-97 (2017)
  2. Tax Policy Center, Distributional Analysis of the Conference Agreement for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017)
  3. Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income: Individual Income Tax Returns Data (2023)
  4. Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2018 to 2028 (2018)

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