Republican members of Congress across the country, as they begin to contemplate next year’s midterm elections, have adopted new messaging around their signature legislation, still officially known as the One Big Beautiful Bill. They seem to be dropping that nomenclature entirely and now describe the bill as the largest tax cut in American history. The problem with that, experts and observers say, is that it isn’t true: For many households, taxes will basically be the same next year as they were last year — and Donald Trump’s tariff policies may well result in a higher effective tax rate.
In late August, the office of Rep. Jay Obernolte, a Republican who represents an enormous Southern California district northeast of Los Angeles, sent out mailers touting the accomplishments of H.R. 1, the GOP’s signature bill. The mailer, as reviewed by Salon, does not mention the billions of dollars funneled into ICE or the funding for Trump’s “Golden Dome,” both of which the administration boasted about when the bill passed on July 4. Nor does it ever identify the legislation as the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Instead, it portrays the measure entirely as a tax cut.
Obernolte isn’t alone. Republicans across the country, from the top down, are increasingly focusing on the tax provisions in the signature GOP megabill.
Rep. Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa, for instance, began calling the bill the “working families tax cut bill” at a town hall meeting last week, and Rep. Mark Alford, R-Mo., similarly referenced the bill only as H.R. 1 during a contentious town hall in late August.
This change seems to be core Republican messaging: Trump himself unofficially kicked off the rebrand effort last week, calling the bill “a massive tax cut for the middle class.”
“Last month, in a landmark achievement, I also proudly signed the largest working-class tax cuts in American history. So the bill that — I’m not going to use the term ‘great, big, beautiful’ — that was good for getting it approved, but it’s not good for explaining to people what it’s all about,” Trump said.
Vice President JD Vance, who pushed the “big, beautiful” brand heavily during the legislative battle, has also been sent out to sell the bill under a new label. He appeared in Georgia last week to campaign against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is up for re-election next year, calling the bill the “biggest tax cut for families that this country has ever seen.”
“I’m not going to use the term ‘great, big, beautiful’ — that was good for getting it approved, but it’s not good for explaining to people what it’s all about.”
“Why don’t we ask Jon Ossoff, ‘Why did you vote to raise taxes? Why did you vote to keep illegal aliens on Medicaid? Why did you vote to make sure that people who work overtime and earn their income from tips pay as much to the federal government as possible?’” Vance said.
This focus on tax cuts appears intended to de-emphasize the billions in spending approved under the Big Beautiful Bill — spending that was Vance’s primary focus earlier this year.
“The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits,” Vance wrote in a tweet earlier this summer. “The OBBB fixes this problem. And therefore it must pass. Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
There could be a problem in trying to sell this bill to the public that way: For many Americans, there won’t be any tax cut. Instead, the bill largely extends the tax rates most people have been paying under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, enacted during Trump’s first term.
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The Tax Foundation, a business-friendly think tank, pointed this out in its analysis of the bill’s effects when it passed in July. Garrett Watson, the director of policy analysis at the Tax Foundation, said in an interview with Salon that, with a few exceptions, “a lot of it is extending, effectively, the status quo.”
“The bulk of that law is basically canceling what would have been a tax increase, not a further tax cut,” Watson said.
The exceptions Watson mentioned include Trump’s promise to cut taxes on tips, overtime work and Social Security income, along with a handful of minor adjustments to the 2017 law. Watson also pointed out that Republican messaging seems to have been reversed. Framing the One Big Beautiful Bill as a tax cut is the opposite of what Republicans claimed when they were pushing to pass the legislation. At that time, the GOP sought to adjust congressional accounting to make the bill’s enormous costs look more affordable for the government.
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“In the lead-up to the law, we heard a lot of messaging from many Republicans about how the costs were less than advertised by the Congressional Budget Office and others,” Watson said. Republican messaging amounted to saying, “We shouldn’t include the cost of extending” the 2017 tax law, he continued, on the theory that “under this current policy baseline,” it would be “a lot cheaper, so they didn’t have to fully cover the cost in terms of deficit changes.”
Many working-class Americans, Watson added, may effectively pay more in taxes in the near future because of Trump’s tariffs on most imported goods. He was reluctant to put a specific figure on those increased costs for American households, especially given the unpredictable changes in Trump’s policy, but provided a Tax Foundation analysis from mid-July that found that the poorest Americans are likely to pay more in tariffs than they’ll save through extending the 2017 tax cuts.
That also means that any households that don’t benefit from changes to the way tips, overtime work and Social Security payments are taxed will see their income taxes remain largely the same, while still paying higher consumer prices overall, due to tariffs.
