The Trump Administration tax cuts were some of the most easily explained of any ever enacted. The marginal tax rates were reduced for everyone, from the poorest to the richest. Some taxes were raised by limiting the tax write-offs of those who have more than $10,000 in expenses such as for state-income and property tax.

This tax proposal was very easy for the Congressional Budget Office to simulate and they showed that essentially all low-income taxpayers would pay less tax and upper-income Americans would pay more tax. It should have been an easy story for the media to explain. Somehow, though, many media outlets (and consequently congressmen, even) told the Americans the opposite — that taxes were raised on the poor and reduced on the wealthy. Sadly, it is fair to call any such reports “fake” news. This wasn’t one of those difficult social science policies such as determining who will pay for health insurance or who will buy lottery tickets. This was very straightforward.

Now the 2018 data are available and we can say with absolute certainty that the only group of taxpayers who paid more taxes had incomes over $1 million. The idea of flat, or slightly progressive taxation has been familiar for decades so this part of the tax plan shouldn’t have been controversial. It was also accomplished by presidents ranging from Kennedy to Nixon. The main idea that Americas have long embraced is that higher-income individuals pay more in taxes. At a 5% tax rate, someone earning $20,000 pays only $1,000, but someone earning $100,000 pays $5,000. Americans have historically accepted as fair some progression so that, say, people earning below $40,000 pay 5% on all of their net income while wealthy people pay 5% on the first $40,000 of income and 7% on income above $40,000. Acceptance of this idea is as old as our republic itself.

What some people found controversial was the limit on state and local tax deductions that could be written off by the wealthy from their federal tax returns. Others and I have written about how this policy will likely cause people, especially wealthier people, to move from high tax states such as Connecticut and Illinois to North Carolina and Florida. Governors in such states, including Cuomo in New York, have been vocal about how unfair this is.

However, their complaint flies in the face of another longstanding approach to taxation. Americans have always accepted that that wealthier should pay more. However, if we allow the residents of some states to deduct expenses in their state from federal taxes, then what is actually happening is that citizens of the poor states are subsidizing the services (such as teacher salary) of the wealthier state. So, poor taxpayers in Mississippi are paying for a higher public expenditure in New York than they have in Mississippi.

Such a practice has historically been found unacceptable by Americans.

So, although the tax policy change resulted in “winners” and “losers,” it was designed to be consistent with American history with regard to such changes, and the “losers” were those who have more than $1 million in income, and the winners are all the rest of us.

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Eric Dent, a former professor at The University of North Carolina at Pembroke, now teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University.