A new Hill-HarrisX poll released Monday shows that only 18 percent of voters say they paid less in taxes under President Donald Trump’s tax law, compared to the year before.
According to the poll conducted ahead of the April 15 tax deadline, the majority of voters (36%) still pay the same, while 32 percent said they now pay more. Fourteen percent were unsure whether their taxes were higher or lower this year compared to last.
President Trump’s tax law, passed last year, delivered tax cuts to businesses and individuals worth $1.5 trillion, but many Americans are skeptical about how much they can benefit from these cuts, which poll clearly demonstrates.
The poll’s results closely resemble those of an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted last month which found that 17 percent of voters said their taxes went down in 2018 compared to 2017.
According to the Tax Policy Center, the overall tax reduction for the majority of people were not as substantial as previously estimated. About 90 percent of individuals saw a decrease of only 2 percent of their household incomes.
“The reality is for most people, the tax bill doesn’t make much of a difference. Some people will have seen quite a small tax cut but it will have been folded into their pay checks so it’s no surprise that people aren’t completely clear on what happened,” said Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.
The results of the Hill-HarrisX poll, however, differed among various party supporters. Republican voters were most likely to say their taxes went down or stayed the same. Among them, 28 percent said they paid less in taxes for 2018, while 25 percent said they paid more and another 37 percent the same.
Among Democrats, these figures were significantly different. Forty percent said they owed more and only 12 percent they owed less in taxes compared to a year before. Thirty-six percent said they did not notice a change in the amount of taxes for 2018 and 2017 they owed.
“I think it’s really interesting that Republicans were less supportive of this bill than you might have expected. They certainly were less supportive when it was going through Congress and when it was signed. And I think even today, you’re still seeing that this was kind of a nothing burger for the Republican party,” Williamson said.
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