While delivering his State of the Union speech on March 1, President Biden was less than honest with the American people about many things.

For example, Biden said his Build Back Better bill would reduce inflation and the annual deficit, claiming, "My plan to fight inflation will lower your costs and lower the deficit.  Seventeen Nobel laureates in economics say my plan will ease long-term inflationary pressures.  Top business leaders and most Americans support my plan."

Sorry, but spending trillions of dollars that would need to be borrowed or printed would increase the deficit and inflation.  One need not be a Nobel laureate in economics to understand that basic principle.

Yet Biden's blunder on the potential effects of Build Back Better pale in comparison to his outright lie regarding his predecessor's tax cut.

In 2017, President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which lowered income taxes for all Americans and reduced the corporate income tax rate as well.

According to President Biden, "[u]nlike the $2 Trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefited the top 1% of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people — and left no one behind."

Oh, really?  Too bad the data tell a different story.

According to a recent Policy Brief authored by Justin Haskins, editorial director at the Heartland Institute, "Republicans' 2017 tax reform law benefited middle- and working-class Americans the most."

Specifically, as Haskins notes, "the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced average effective income tax rates for filers in every one of the IRS's income brackets, with the largest benefits going to lower- and middle-income households."

Moreover, "IRS data further show that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act appeared to have a strong upward effect on economic mobility.  The number of filers with an adjusted gross income of $1 to $25,000 decreased by more than 2 million in just one year, while the number of households reporting incomes higher than $25,000 increased in every income bracket."

However, the fact that the middle and lower classes reaped the largest rewards from the TCJA is only half of the story.

Despite Biden's allegation that the TCJA would be a windfall for the wealthy, the exact opposite occurred.

"The IRS data also revealed that higher-income earners paid an even larger share of the total tax burden in 2018 than they did in 2017, indicating that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act may have made the tax code slightly more progressive," Haskins writes.

What's more, "[i]n 2017, filers earning $500,000 or more paid 38.9 percent of all personal income tax revenues.  In 2018, the same income bracket paid 41.5 percent of total income tax revenues."

For whatever reason, Biden chose to lie to the American people about the reality of Trump's TCJA.  Maybe this is because the left has been, and remains, steadfastly opposed to reducing taxes, even when doing so largely benefits the working and middle classes.

For decades, the left has taken a monolithic position disparaging across-the-board tax cuts, like those enacted under TCJA.

Even when the data prove irrefutably that tax cuts create jobs, spur economic growth, disproportionately benefit the middle and lower classes, make the tax system more progressive, and increase economic mobility, leftists like Biden continue to spout bald-faced lies about their effects.

Americans ought to be well aware that the GOP's TCJA was integral to the booming economy created before the pandemic, in which all Americans, but especially those in the lower and middle classes, experienced the greatest gains.

With inflation raging at a 40-year high of 7.5 percent and gasoline approaching $4 per gallon, the last thing Americans need is a tax hike.

Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is senior editor at The Heartland Institute.

Image: Gage Skidmore.