“The Republican tax bill rigged the system against working people,” Stacey Abrams said Tuesday night in her Democratic response to President Trump’s State of the Union speech. “Rather than bringing back jobs, plants are closing, layoffs are looming, and wages struggle to keep pace with the actual cost of living.”

There are several implications to Abrams’ disjointed proclamation. The first is that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed a year ago, harmed middle- and lower-income workers. This rhetorical flourish cannot be taken seriously. The tax reform did not raise the tax burden of middle- or lower-income earners either by absolute dollars or by share of the burden. It lowered the tax burden for nearly all those people by dramatically increasing the standard deduction and the refundable child tax credit.