Delivering tax cuts for working families

As a limited-government fiscal conservative, I strongly believe that, by responsibly cutting taxes for families, farmers, and businesses on Main Street, we can grow our economy and incentivize hard work.

Letting workers keep more of their paycheck, helping parents tackle the financial challenges of raising kids, keeping family farms alive through death tax relief, and encouraging small businesses and manufacturers to invest and hire are all critical components of economic growth, especially in rural communities. These priorities are what we codified into law when President Donald Trump signed the Working Families Tax Cuts.

This historic package of tax cuts for families, farmers, workers, seniors and small businesses is the jet fuel that will ignite our economy and make life more affordable for Iowans.

As a father of four, I know the importance of maintaining the family budget and making every dollar stretch as far as possible. It’s why we took concrete steps to deliver real tax relief for working families by increasing the child tax credit to $2,200 and preserving the doubled standard deduction of nearly $32,000 for married couples. We made these policies permanent so that these benefits don’t arbitrarily expire.

We also reformed Dependent Care Assistance Plans, which let parents put away $7,500 pretax for child-care costs, and strengthened the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit — which hadn’t been updated since 2001 — to ensure that working parents could receive more generous tax relief for child-care expenses, supporting approximately 4,000,000 families nationwide.

We further increased the annual K-12 education withdrawal cap for 529 savings accounts from $10,000 to $20,000, giving parents a greater voice in their children’s education.

Being the second largest state for agricultural production, this law is also a tremendous investment in Iowa and our rural communities. We passed and codified a large portion of the Farm Bill such as increasing reference prices for corn from $3.70 to $4.10 and soybeans from $8.40 to $10.00 and making crop insurance policies more affordable at higher levels of coverage. Taken together, these improvements will help protect our producers from volatile agriculture markets and low commodity prices out of their control.

This package further includes legislation that I authored to increase the death tax exemption to $15 million, ensuring that our family farms can be passed from one generation to the next, and to allow our community banks to offer agricultural loans at lower rates, investing in rural development and economic opportunity.

Additionally, we increased Section 179 expensing to $2.5 million to help our farmers purchase the equipment they need and incorporated provisions to support the production of homegrown Iowa biofuels, which lower prices at the pump, support our farmers, and reduce our dependence on foreign countries for our energy needs.

Since more than 99 percent of businesses in Iowa are small businesses and manufacturing is a vital sector of our economy, we passed and signed into law several pro-growth provisions that will grow domestic manufacturing and support our business community. As a result of this law, we made permanent the 20 percent deduction on qualified business income for small businesses and local manufacturers so that our job creators can take those savings and reinvest in our communities, hire new employees and expand their operations here in Iowa.

I also had legislation included to help Iowa small businesses offer paid family and medical leave to their employees.

Moreover, we restored 100 percent bonus depreciation and immediate research and development expensing to encourage investment and job creation in our state and in our rural communities. We even went a step further by creating new immediate expensing for the construction of U.S.-based manufacturing plants and agricultural facilities, which will drive capital into Iowa, strengthen our manufacturing base and create good-paying jobs for Iowa workers.

Speaking of investments in our workforce, we spared no effort to ensure that this package of tax cuts was written for working Iowans. We ended taxes on tips and overtime so that a server picking up an extra shift or a police officer working weekends truly benefits from that effort, and we eliminated taxes on car-loan interest up to $10,000 for American-made vehicles, delivering relief for Iowa drivers and supporting the U.S. auto industry and other businesses that rely on its success.

We also made the standard deduction permanent at nearly $16,000 for workers — shielding wages and earnings up to that amount from federal taxes.

Finally, we established a new $6,000 deduction for our seniors, which will ensure that 88 percent of Social Security recipients do not pay any tax on their Social Security benefits. In a similar effort to support our seniors, we authorized a $50-billion fund for rural hospitals, improving rural health infrastructure and working to make care more affordable and accessible for Iowans.

The working families tax cuts that we passed as Republicans are the culmination of President Trump’s promises on the campaign trail to revive domestic manufacturing, support agriculture and lower costs for Iowa families. With these tax cuts and pro-growth provisions now law, our economy will grow, families and workers will see real tax savings, and businesses will expand, hire and invest right here in Iowa and across our great nation.

This op-ed was originally published in the Northwest Iowa Review on September 22, 2025.