US Treasury Collects Record Taxes in 1st Month Under Trump Tax Cuts
Just one month after President Donald Trump’s new tax plan went into effect, the U.S. Treasury announced that the federal government ran a surplus by collecting record total tax revenues last month.
The U.S. Treasury just released their Monthly Treasury Statment for January and it shows that the Treasury collected approximately $361.038 billion in tax revenues.
According to CNSNews, the government only spent about $311.8 billion last month to run a surplus of $49.2 billion.
However, the federal government is still running a deficit of approximately $175.7 billion for fiscal 2018 because the month was started with about $225 billion in deficit.
As a result of the new tax law, the Treasury collected about $11.75 billion more this January than they collected last January under former President Barack Obama.
This month was not the only month that record taxes were collected. The Treasury has also collected record tax revenues in the first four months of the fiscal year, according to CNSNews.
As of the most recent Monthly Treasury Statement, the federal government has collected over $1.13 trillion in taxes for the fiscal year 2018.
Even though the government has collected record taxes for this fiscal year, it is still in deficit because it spent $1.3 billion of that tax money.
It is not unusual for the federal government to run a surplus in January. In fact, over the last 20 fiscal years, it ran a surplus 13 different times in January.
Six of the seven times the government ran deficits coincided with the time that Obama was in office.
New guidance and withholding tables for employers were released by the U.S. Treasury and IRS in January, according to CNN.
Thanks to these tables and the new tax law, more people will receive a higher paycheck. Employers have until Feb. 15 to incorporate the changes into their payroll.
The new tables are designed to help approximate the change in workers’ tax liability in a way that “delivers benefits as soon as possible to as many people as possible with as little disruption as possible” a senior Treasury official said.
CNN advises taxpayers to assess whether the tables are withholding enough money so they don’t have a big bill when they file taxes next year.
Individuals could be affected by new tax brackets, lower income taxes, a near-doubling of the standard deduction and the removal of personal exemptions and deductions.
Larry Kudlow, a top economist who worked in the Reagan administration, thinks the tax reform bill President Donald Trump signed into law late last year has made the U.S. the “best country” for business.
Kudlow — who served as a senior economic adviser on the Trump campaign — suggested that the tax reform legislation is the reason the U.S. is once again turning into a nation where companies actually want to do business. The legislation benefited businesses by cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, meaning they have less incentive to move their operations overseas.
“America is once again becoming the best investment environment in the world — the best country in which to do business,” Kudlow said. “And that’s a powerful positive.”
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