1040 Postmortem: Making Sense of Your Taxes and Withholding
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which passed in December 2017, made fundamental changes to the U.S. tax code, and 2018 returns were the first time most taxpayers could see the practical impact of these changes.
In an April 2019 Gallup poll, 43% of Americans said they were unsure how the new tax law affected them personally. Surprisingly, 21% thought their federal income taxes went up in 2018, and 21% said they were about the same. Only 14% of respondents reported that their taxes went down, even though independent analyses and preliminary tax filing data suggested that about two-thirds of Americans would owe less in federal taxes in 2018.