President-elect Donald Trump will begin his second nonconsecutive term with Republican control of both chambers of Congress, including a 53-47 Senate majority. However, the House Republican majority is likely no higher than a narrow 221-214, or perhaps a seat more.
Still, the former and future president’s victories in both the Electoral College and the popular vote grant him a resounding mandate to govern. To make the most of the moment, the momentum, and the popular mandate to fix the economic disaster left behind by retiring President Joe Biden and Trump’s vanquished 2024 rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, he would be wise to prioritize preserving and expanding the economic legacy from his first 2017-2021 term and doing so within the (relative) grace period of his first 100 days back in the Oval Office.
That means making Trump’s landmark 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent and expanding the child tax credit a priority. Here’s how Trump can do it without increasing the deficit.
While the primary macroeconomic benefit of the TCJA — lowering the corporate tax rate from the globally anomalous 35% to the European average of a flat 21% — is permanent, some of the law’s most meaningful individual income tax provisions are due to expire at the end of 2025. Without Congress and Trump enacting an extension, not only would individual income tax rates skyrocket, but the child tax credit and standard deduction would also be slashed in half.
The doubled child tax credit and standard deduction delivered real disposable income increases to the middle and working classes. Also, it crucially translated to a simplified tax payment process for tens of millions of people in the United States. Whereas two-thirds of tax filers used the standard deduction before the TCJA went into effect, now just 1 in 10 tax filers, who are disproportionately wealthy, choose the complication of itemizing their tax deductions.
Trump can get to his other proposed tax cuts in the future, but for the TCJA, time is of the essence. Recall that failing to extend the TCJA’s expiring individual provisions would result in a tax hike for 62% of taxpayers. Trump should pay for the preservation of the TCJA and further increase the CTC for the working class by eliminating two regressive and expensive tax deductions: the state and local tax deduction and the mortgage interest deduction.
While the TCJA capped the SALT deduction at $10,000 and the MID at $750,000, both are also due to expire.
Making all of the worthy tax cuts would cost about $2.2 trillion over the next decade in lost revenue, according to a dynamic analysis by the Tax Foundation. Conveniently, economists also estimate that eliminating the SALT deduction would generate — you guessed it — a little more than $2 trillion in federal revenue over a decade, with annual gains of more than $200 billion in federal revenue starting in 2026.
The SALT deduction is bad economics, but it’s even worse politics. Uncapped, the majority of the SALT deduction would go to the top 1% of earners. Before the TCJA, the unfettered SALT deduction meant the federal government funded 40% of all revenue collected by California’s top marginal tax rate. Even with the $10,000 cap in place, more than 75% of the benefit goes to the top 20% of earners. In effect, letting the SALT deduction cap expire would hike taxes on working-class people in red states to fund progressive state experiments, such as taxpayer-funded Medicaid for illegal immigrants.
By contrast, eliminating the SALT deduction to make the TCJA individual provisions permanent would make wealthy blue-state residents pay for the policies they voted for. Beyond those immediate benefits for the middle and working class, making those TCJA provisions permanent would increase GDP by 0.5% and employment by nearly 700,000 jobs.
The MID is a similarly obvious candidate for the chopping block. According to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the MID is similarly regressive to the SALT deduction, but it also reduces homeownership rates and housing affordability. Eliminating the MID would result in a 5% increase in the homeownership rate and a 4% decrease in home prices. It could also finance further expansion of the child tax credit, beginning the fulfillment of a key campaign promise made emphatically by Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.
With the $750,000 cap, the MID deduction costs the federal government about $30 billion per year, but if the cap expires, the cost balloons to more than $60 billion in 2026. A complete elimination of the MID could add at least $60 billion in annual federal revenue.
The TCJA doubled the CTC from $1,000 to $2,000 per year per child, with $1,400 of that amount refundable for lower-income earners who pay little to nothing in net federal income tax. Under the TCJA, the CTC begins to incrementally phase out for single filers earning at least $200,000 and joint filers earning at least $400,000.
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Assuming that axing the SALT deduction would be used to pay for extending the bulk of the TCJA, further expanding the CTC from $2,000 to $3,000 would cost a little more than $60 billion per year. In other words, we have yet another tax break for the wealthy that could deliver a profamily, pronatalist tax break for the working and middle classes.
A multiracial and disproportionately working-class coalition delivered Trump to the White House in the hopes of reversing the damage wrought by Bidenomics. Trump should reward his voters by preventing painful tax hikes, making his economic legacy permanent, and beginning the expansion of progrowth and profamily policies that provide relief without exacerbating our persistent deficit crisis.
