Charts show tax bill's impact by income groups

A Congressional Budget Office report released Sunday found that the Senate tax plan stands to disproportionately help the wealthy, while barely benefiting the middle class and causing the poorest Americans to lose money. That's relevant to rural America, since rural residents tend to be less well-off, generally. PBS analyzed the data and produced three easy-to-understand charts that illustrate the bill's effect.

The first chart breaks down how much families in each income bracket would gain or lose. "Highlighted in red, you can see lower-income groups face overall losses, per person or family, in this plan. But take a closer look at the amounts. The size of the losses for lower incomes is dwarfed by the massive gains — up to $59,000 per tax filer — at the upper end of the income scale," Lisa Desjardins reports for PBS. (PBS charts; click on each image to enlarge it)

The second chart shows that the wealthy not only gain the most in flat dollar amounts, but also the most money relative to income:

The third chart controls for the size of the population in each income bracket to determine the percentage of Americans who would benefit (or not) from the tax bill, and how much. The low-income brackets represent a larger share of the population than the higher-income brackets, but the high-income taxpayers would gain many times more money from the bill:

"These numbers show what conservatives rarely say directly these days — that they believe the U.S. tax system is too progressive, and moves too many resources from the rich to the poor," Desjardins writes. "The GOP tax plan is a decided shift in the other direction."