Who is benefiting the most from the Trump administration's tax cuts
PBS News Hour - Segments
PBS NewsHour
4.1 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 April 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Tax Day. The deadline for filing your taxes is tomorrow. And the President and Republican lawmakers are trying to draw voters' attention to new tax cuts and increased deductions approved last year in the so-called One Big Beautiful Act. But with the war, higher prices for gas and other economic costs, some polls suggest many Americans don't feel they're |
| 0:22.3 | benefiting much from the new law. Stephanie Syg gets some detail now on what's changed. |
| 0:28.6 | Now, one of the main things the new law did was keep in place many tax cuts established back in 2017 |
| 0:35.3 | that were due to expire. But it also included some significant changes, |
| 0:40.3 | including a boost in the standard deduction to $31,500 for married couples filing jointly and 15,750 for |
| 0:50.8 | single filers. A new senior bonus deduction for people 65 and older worth up to $6,000 a person. |
| 0:59.5 | A big jump in the deduction for state and local taxes known as salt. That's back up to a cap of $40,000. |
| 1:07.4 | New limits on taxes on tips capped at a deduction of $25,000 as well as new deductions for overtime. |
| 1:16.0 | Eligible workers can now deduct up to $12,500 of overtime pay. |
| 1:21.5 | To help walk us through some of these changes, I'm joined now by Andrew Duren, who covers tax policy for the New York Times. |
| 1:28.5 | Andrew, let's just jump right in because there's a lot. |
| 1:32.1 | Some of these policies really do seem significant. |
| 1:34.7 | The senior bonus, the raising of the salt deduction, but I also understand from reading |
| 1:38.8 | your reporting that there are limitations on how much the average taxpayer may benefit. |
| 1:43.6 | So who really stands to gain the most |
| 1:45.8 | from these changes and who might not get the impact that they're expecting to get in their |
| 1:50.5 | refund? Yes, so it's a great question. I think one of the main things, obviously these tax |
| 1:56.8 | cuts depend on whether you're eligible for them in the first place. So something like the senior |
| 2:02.8 | deduction, for example, only people who are 65 and older will be able to benefit from that. |
| 2:08.7 | But more broadly, across all of these tax cuts, the biggest winners are going to be people |
| 2:12.9 | who have made enough money to have income and therefore taxes to cut in the first place. |
| 2:19.6 | All of these changes are structured as deductions, which means that people who already make |
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