Poll: 34 percent approve of Trump’s tax law

A poll released Wednesday found that more people disapprove of President Trump’s 2017 tax-cut law than approve of it — the latest sign that the law is unpopular with voters.

Thirty-four percent of adults surveyed by Monmouth University Poll said they approved of the plan, compared with 43 percent who disapproved of it. When asked about the law in March 2018, a Monmouth poll found 41 percent of respondents in favor of it and 42 percent against it.

{mosads}The recent survey was conducted April 11-15, the end of the first tax filing season under the law, when people were filing their returns for 2018. The tax-code rewrite made a number of changes, including lowering rates and increasing the standard deduction and child tax credit.

Analysts across the political spectrum estimate that most people got a tax cut for 2018.

The Tax Policy Center said about 65 percent of taxpayers are seeing a reduction in their taxes from the individual provisions in Trump’s law, and only 6 percent are seeing an increase. On average, taxpayers are projected to see a 1.7 percent increase in their after-tax incomes due to the tax law’s individual provisions, according to the Tax Policy Center.

The Monmouth poll found that 46 percent of respondents said their tax burden was the same this year as in 2017. Just 14 percent said that burden went down, while 28 percent reported higher taxes.

The percentage of taxpayers in the new poll who said their taxes were the same was higher than those who in March 2018 expected their taxes to remain the same. In last year’s poll, 31 percent of respondents said they expected no change, 23 percent expected their taxes to go down and 37 percent were expecting higher taxes.

“The perception may not match reality in terms of how many people actually got a tax reduction,” Monmouth University Polling Institute Director Patrick Murray said in a statement. “While fears about a rising tax bill diminished after Americans filed their 2018 returns, very few report seeing any benefit from these reforms. This is not good news for a president who wanted to use this issue as a selling point for re-election.”

The Monmouth poll is one of several in recent weeks to find low levels of popularity for the tax law, and most surveys taken since the law’s December 2017 passage have found that more people oppose the law than support it. A Pew Research Center poll conducted late last month found that 36 percent of adults surveyed approved of the law, with 49 percent in opposition.

Wednesday’s survey is also in line with other recent polls that found most people don’t think they got a tax cut from the law. A The Hill/Harris X poll found that 18 percent of respondents reported paying less in taxes, 32 percent said they paid more and 36 percent said they paid about the same.

Monmouth surveyed 801 adults in its April poll. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.