Earlier this month the U.S. House of Representatives passed a major new tax and spending bill that not only represents the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in history, taking away SNAP and Medicaid benefits from millions of recipients including tens of thousands in West Virginia, but also includes tax provisions that would overwhelmingly favor the richest taxpayers in the state. For working-class West Virginians, the tax cuts in the House bill are extremely modest and are easily offset by the losses of Medicaid coverage and SNAP benefits.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) overwhelmingly benefitted the nation’s highest earners and corporations, making sweeping changes to the federal tax cut including reducing individual income tax rates, reducing estate taxes, and cutting the corporate tax rate. While the benefits for corporations were made permanent back in 2017, several substantial provisions were set to expire at the end of 2025 if not extended. The package the U.S. House passed this month dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, would permanently extend those cuts, overwhelmingly benefitting the nation’s wealthiest households.
A new state-by-state analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy takes a look at the distribution and impacts of the tax cut provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill in West Virginia.
The top 1 percent of earners in West Virginia would receive a tax cut averaging nearly $50,000 annually, just under the median household income in WV and more than 40 times greater than the average net tax cut received by a middle income household. Tax cuts going to the top 1 percent of households in the state would total of $450.8 million in net tax cuts in 2026. The middle 20 percent of taxpayers, a group that is 20 times the size of the richest 1 percent, would receive less than half that much, $209.5 million in tax cuts.
While the richest 1 percent of households would each get an annual tax cut that would pay for a new car outright (the average new car price in 2025 is just under $50,000), the average annual tax cut for the bottom 20 percent of households in West Virginia ($120) falls short of even covering one month of a household’s average car payment.
It’s important to note that the tax changes are not happening alone. Once accounting for the benefit changes to SNAP and Medicaid, households with incomes below $40,000, or about 40 percent of households nationwide, are expected to see a net decrease in their incomes on average.
In addition, the effects of President Trump’s tariff policies offset most of the tax cuts for all but the wealthiest households, making 80 percent of Americans worse off if announced tariffs remain in place. For the bottom 40 percent of Americans, the tariffs impose a cost that is greater than the tax cuts received under the legislation.
Between slashing SNAP and Medicaid for tens of thousands of West Virginians to finance tax cuts that overwhelmingly favor the wealthy, the One Big Beautiful Bill turns out to be pretty ugly for West Virginia.
