Make the whole Trump tax cut retroactive — to January 1st. There are 1,000 reasons why some sort of soak-the-rich tax hike will be a terrible idea.

And let me repeat my view that President Trump will not raise taxes, regardless of various rumors and half baked stories.

As the former speaker, Newt Gingrich, said last night on this show, Mr. Trump is really a Reagan guy, not a George H.W. Bush guy.

Bush served as the template here for tax hike disaster when he violated his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge — and signed the tax-hike bill back in 1991, which probably cost him reelection and ended his political career.

Mr. Gingrich also suggested making the Trump tax cuts retroactive — back to January 1.

And finally, as Mr. Gingrich told us last evening, there are 44 Senate Republicans who signed Grover Norquist’s tax payer protection pledge, and more than 180 House Republicans who also signed.

So if the White House pushed a tax hike, the “one, big, beautiful” reconciliation bill would go up in flames.

And that would be a major political disaster.

But there are some important economic reasons to stay away from tax hikes.

Contrary to what Democrats always say, the 2017 Trump tax cuts benefited the middle and lower income tax brackets far more than the top bracket.

Actually, it was a very progressive tax cut bill.

According to an excellent piece filed on Fox News Digital by a Heartland Institute senior fellow, Justin Haskins, the tax payers who received the biggest percentage of money saved earned less than $75,000.

Using IRS data, Mr. Haskins found that the average filer in the $40,000-50,000 IRS bracket paid 18.8 percent less in taxes in 2022 than they did in 2017, and 2022 is the last year for which complete data are available.

The average filer in the $50,000 to $75,000 bracket was 16.5 percent less.

And for those earning between $5 million to $10 million, well, they only got a 2.3 percent break.

So it really wasn’t a millionaires’ tax cut, and certainly not a billionaires’ tax cut.

And the actual dollar amounts are eye-opening.

Filers between $50,000 and $75,000 saved $4,516, in the $75,000 to $100,00 bracket the savings jumped to $5,923, and in the $100,000 to $200,000 bracket the savings were $9,638.

Democrats love to lie about any and all tax cuts, even though they know all about the data that Mr. Haskins has analyzed.

It’s similar to Democrats jumping up and down screaming that Donald Trump is going to destroy Social Security, or Medicare, or Medicaid.

They know it’s untrue — but they’ve been doing it for as long as anyone can remember.

The trick for Republicans is to fight back, with numbers.

Because the taxpaying public is a whole lot smarter than you think.

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business Network.