Treasury press release is riddled with lies

The Treasury Department’s press release describes the Working Families Tax Cuts as a bonanza for the working man, a direct hit of relief for low- and middle-income earners. It is a fine piece of political storytelling, and like many fine stories, it bears only a passing resemblance to the truth.

The data from independent, nonpartisan analysts tells a different tale entirely, one where the lion’s share of the benefits flows not to the assembly line but to the boardroom.

The biggest winners are people who made enough money to have income and, therefore, taxes to cut in the first place. Americans reaping the greatest benefits from Trump’s tax changes are those earning the most, not the working-class families that Trump’s administration is claiming.

“The Department of the Treasury’s new analysis of this past tax filing season confirms President Trump’s Working Families Tax Cuts delivered the largest share of tax relief directly to millions of low- and middle- income Americans providing for their families, working overtime, living on fixed incomes, and running small businesses,” claims the press release.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) and the Tax Policy Center showed that the dollar value of tax savings is disproportionately skewed toward high earners. According to the Tax Policy Center, 60% of percent of the savings from Trump’s sweeping changes benefit the richest 20% of households — those earning over $217,000.

Secretary Scott Bessent’s declaration that “American families and workers overwhelmingly benefitted” and that the cuts “provide greater relief and financial certainty to low- and middle-income households” is a masterful use of illusion. It conjures a picture of widespread relief, but the reality is narrower and far more concentrated at the very top of the income ladder. 

The numbers from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center tell the plain truth: the bottom fifth of earners—households making roughly $35,000 a year or less—would receive a pittance, a mere 1.5% of the total tax cuts. Their average yearly break comes to about $120.

Meanwhile, for the top fifth of earners—those pulling in roughly $217,000 or more—the story is entirely different. This group scoops up a breathtaking 65.3% of all the tax cut’s benefits. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found a similar picture, calculating that a staggering 69% of the net tax cuts go to this same top fifth of Americans.

Look closer, and the picture gets starker still. The Treasury’s release boasts that 96% of filers who saw a tax cut earned less than $200,000, a figure designed to impress. But a high number of people getting a little bit is not the same as a fair distribution of a whole lot. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that the richest 1% of earners—those with incomes topping a million dollars—would enjoy an average tax cut of $70,000. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy puts the figure at $61,000 for the top 1%.

For the financial elite, the benefit is almost unimaginable. The wealthiest 0.1% of American households—a group of investors and inheritors earning an average of $5 million or more—would see their annual tax bills slashed by nearly $280,000 a piece. Let that sink in: a tax cut of nearly $280,000 for the richest one-tenth of one percent.

The contrast is as plain as a grease stain. The family working two jobs to pay the rent might get a few hundred dollars back on their taxes. Their neighbor’s boss—or their boss’s boss—gets a new luxury car. The numbers are not a matter of opinion or political spin. They are the cold, hard arithmetic of who gets what. And by that measure, this Working Families Tax Cut looks less like a program to help those who need it most and more like a well-packaged gift to those who need it least.