Scott Horsley

He told me that people didn't used to necessarily pay a lot of attention to what their monthly electric bill or heating bill was.

They knew what the price of gasoline was.

They knew what the price of eggs was.

But these other prices, they just weren't all that salient.

But now they know.

They've seen these big spikes, and they can tell you how much they paid for electricity last month or how much they paid for natural gas to heat their homes.

You know, it's going to be very interesting to see how much those tax cuts really move the needle because we know from all the official forecasts that the lion's share of these tax cuts are going to upper income families and corporations.

You know, people at the bottom rungs of the income ladder, and I say really the bottom rungs, really up until about the midpoint of the income ladder,

The tax cuts really aren't all that much.

And they're also, for many people, being offset by higher costs for health insurance, maybe a loss of Medicaid with some of the new requirements there.

So it's not going to be an unalloyed win for a lot of families, including the ones who are most acutely affected by some of the affordability challenges we've talked about.

Remember, a lot of what the tax bill passed last summer did was simply extend the tax cuts that were initially passed back in 2017.

So I suppose it'll be a positive for people that their taxes won't be going up.

But in most cases, they're not going to be going down a whole lot either.

Now, for tipped workers, they might see a more meaningful decrease from the no tax on tips measure, for example.

Some Social Security recipients may get a little bit of a break.

But I think most middle and lower income families are probably not going to see a huge windfall in their take-home pay.

And so the political benefit and the economic benefit of those tax cuts may be kind of watered down.

This is an old fight.

This goes back even to President Trump's first term in office when he used to job on the Fed.