Who are the winners and losers of recent federal tax changes?
We don’t know. The changes over the last four years have been tax cuts and we haven’t paid for those cuts, either by reducing spending or by increasing other taxes. We paid for them by increasing the deficit. What that means is that someone else is going to have to pay for those tax cuts. And we don’t know who. It could be our children who pay, or it could be us a few years from now. Will we pay for those cuts by slashing food stamps and Medicare and Medicaid? In that case, low- and middle-income Americans could be worse off. Alternatively, if we raise tax rates on rich people, then they could end up worse off than they would have been without the tax cuts. At first glance, it looks like most people got tax cuts over the last four years. But the biggest tax cuts by far went to very wealthy people. The average tax cut for people making more than a million dollars in 2005 was over $103,000. People earning less than $10,000 got $4. The average cut was $1,400. So people at the top got a ta
