Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., called on fellow Republican lawmakers to produce "the biggest working-class tax cut" in American history.
In a Tuesday opinion column for The Washington Post, Hawley wrote that the GOP-led Congress can give America's working class "a lifeline" by making the largest income tax credits — the home mortgage deduction, the child tax credit, and the charitable deduction — available to all citizens who pay the payroll tax.
Hawley said America's working people annually pay billions in taxes, mostly in payroll taxes by which the federal government takes in well over $1 trillion per year.
He offered two examples: One with a father of six and pastor of a small church, and the other a married couple with two daughters and a mortgage, where each would save between $6,500 and $7,500 per year.
"These popular tax credits provide billions in tax relief every year. But, as it stands, you have to earn a considerable amount of money, and pay a considerable amount of income tax, before these credits become fully available," Hawley wrote.
"Yet two-thirds of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes. And most working-class Americans pay little or no income tax at all."
Hawley, a member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, said negotiations over President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful" budget bill have included "surprisingly little talk of tax cuts for the people who need them most: America's working class."
"These are the people who make less than $80,000 per year. These are the people who delivered an electoral victory for Trump. And these are the Americans Washington policy types have largely forgotten for a generation," Hawley wrote. "Republicans should remember them now — and deliver for them the largest tax cut in our lifetime."
Working Americans need a break, Haley said, as manufacturing jobs have disappeared, blue-collar workers haven't received a real pay raise in decades, and mortgages, rents, and groceries are unaffordable.
"All this takes a toll on the spirit as much as the checkbook," Hawley said. "To find jobs, young people move away from the places where they grew up. Families are pulled apart, and small towns wither and die.
"To afford children, parents take multiple jobs, work around the clock, and return home exhausted and despairing. To survive in the present, many Americans live with no hope for the future: no time for neighborhood or church or family life.
"Republicans can begin to repair it. They can give America's working people a lifeline by giving them the biggest working-class tax cut in our history."
House Republicans last week narrowly approved their budget framework, a political turnaround after Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., worked into the night to satisfy GOP holdouts who had refused to advance trillions of dollars in tax breaks without deeper spending cuts.
Central to the budget framework is the Republican effort to preserve the tax breaks approved in 2017, during Trump's first term, while potentially adding the new ones he promised during his 2024 campaign. That includes no taxes on tipped wages, Social Security income and others, ballooning the price tag to some $7 trillion over the decade.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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