The National Debt Is Barreling Toward $50 Trillion.
Now Trump May Give Out Massive Tax Cuts to the 1% Quick Read – The national debt grows $1.8 trillion per year, putting $50 trillion within arithmetic reach as Trump pushes a capital gains tax cut. – The top 1% captures between 50 and 70 percent of all capital gains, making inflation indexing a benefit concentrated almost entirely among the wealthiest households. – The proposal could add $950 billion to debt by 2035, yet most middle-class equity sits inside 401(k)s where capital gains indexing never applies. – The national debt sits above $39 trillion and climbs by roughly $1.8 trillion a year, according to Congressional Budget Office data covering the first 10 months of fiscal 2026
At that pace, $50 trillion isn’t a distant hypothetical — it’s arithmetic. Against that backdrop, the Trump administration is developing a capital gains proposal that would index cost basis to inflation, a change National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett confirmed is part of a broader tax package headed toward Republicans’ midterm election playbook. The pitch sounds fair on its face: only tax real gains, not inflation.
But the mechanics of who owns capital assets in America mean this proposal, whatever its merits, would deliver the overwhelming majority of its dollar benefit to a narrow slice of the wealthiest households. Why the Money Flows to the Top Capital gains realizations are not spread evenly across the income ladder — they’re concentrated near the summit. The top 1% of earners typically account for somewhere between 50% and 70%-plus of taxable long-term capital gains in a given year, and the top 0.1% alone can claim close to half of that total in some analyses.