Obama's tax policy focused on fairness and supporting working families, increasing credits like the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), creating the American Opportunity Tax Credit (AOTC) for college, extending Bush-era tax cuts for most Americans, and raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations through measures like the Affordable Care Act (ACA) surtaxes to fund investments and reduce inequality, making the code more progressive. Key actions included the Making Work Pay Credit, payroll tax holidays, and closing loopholes for corporations and high-income earners.
Tax policy
It extended the Bush tax cuts for roughly the bottom 99% of income earners (those earning below $400,000, or $450,000 for married couples). Capital gains, dividends, and estate tax rates were also increased relative to the 2003–2012 levels; these also mainly affect high-income and wealthy households.
In 2012, during the fiscal cliff, Obama overcame the sunset provisions and made the tax cuts permanent for single people earning less than $400,000 per year and couples making less than $450,000 per year, but did not stop the sunset provisions from applying to higher incomes, under the American Taxpayer Relief Act of ...
President Donald Trump signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on Dec. 22, 2017, which cut personal tax rates and personal exemptions which expire in 2025 and revert to the old, higher rates.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in 2018 that the 2017 law would cost $1.9 trillion over ten years, and recent estimates show that making the law's temporary individual income and estate tax cuts permanent would cost roughly another $4.2 trillion through 2035.
At the end of 2025, the individual portions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expire all at once. Without congressional action, 62 percent of filers could soon face a tax increase relative to current policy in 2026. At the same time, the price tag for extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts is in the trillions.
Whom Did They Benefit the Most? The largest benefits from the Bush tax cuts flowed to high-income taxpayers. From 2004-2012 (the years for which comparable estimates are available), the top 1 percent of households received average tax cuts of more than $50,000 each year.
Multiple other analyses have found that higher debt and deficits lead to upward pressure on interest rates. Paying for the cost of extending and expanding tax cuts will directly lead to lower interest rates than extension without offsets. Lower interest rates mean lower borrowing costs throughout the economy.
He raised taxes on higher income taxpayers early in his first term and cut defense spending and welfare, which contributed to a rise in revenue and decline in spending relative to the size of the economy.
To raise additional revenue for reform, the ACA imposed excise taxes on health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and manufacturers of medical devices; raised taxes on high-income families; and increased limits on the income tax deduction for medical expenses.
Bush's economic policies caused the Great Recession and Barack Obama's ended it, then your Election Day decision is likely an easy one.
Walter Anderson, an entrepreneur and billionaire, was convicted of the largest tax evasion case in American history. At the time of his conviction, he owed the United States government nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in back taxes. Perhaps the most notorious tax evasion scandal of all is that of Al Capone.
That meant that the federal government took 91 cents of every dollar over $200,000. When you added it all up, someone in 1955 who made $1 million a year paid over $800,000 in taxes. At least they did in theory.
Estimating TCJA's budget impact
The specific amount varies—from about $1 trillion to $2 trillion—for three reasons. First, the agencies estimated budget impacts using both conventional methods (which do not account for potential changes to the overall economy) and dynamic methods (which do).
No Tax on Overtime is a provision that was included in a larger tax reform bill that passed in July 2025. It allows certain workers to deduct up to $12,500 in qualified overtime compensation from their taxable income on their federal income tax return. Joint filers can deduct up to $25,000.
TCJA made many large changes across multiple areas of the tax code, including most infamously reducing the corporate tax rate, increasing the standard deduction, and increasing the applicable exclusion amounts for estate taxes.
If the individual tax cuts expire, taxpayers in all income groups would face higher and more complicated taxes. Machinery and equipment expensing is a key provision that, if allowed to expire, would especially harm capital-intensive industries like manufacturing.