Usually this isn’t a very happy day for Americans – except in the sense that the filing of our annual tax return is behind us. No one loves the paperwork or the burden of forking over our hard-earned dollars to Uncle Sam.

Yet, we realize that taxation is necessary to fund the government, and at the very least we expect our government to protect our safety and our rights and provide certain services to us and to others in society.

The good news is that, due to reforms passed in late 2017, this year (2018) our government will be collecting tax revenue in a way that is much more beneficial to hardworking Americans and to our economy. We’ve done a deep dive into these changes in our April Policy Focus on the tax reform law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

We know there’s more than just an economic policy debate at stake here: Like everyone else, we at Independent Women’s Forum were curious how these reforms would impact everyday people, especially women.

So, we invented a series of women – Julia, Cathy, Ashley and Eileen – and asked some analyst friends of ours at the Tax Foundation to run the numbers. What would happen to these women under the new tax law?

You can read that blog series by clicking here.

But now that we are well into 2018, we don’t have to imagine or project how the tax law will affect real women and their families. We know that the law is helping.

Because of the new law, we can truly say “Happy Tax Day!” in 2017 as we put the old tax laws behind us and look forward to the positive changes for 2018.  It always feels good to have the tax paperwork behind us, but this year we can be especially glad that next year, our burden will be lighter in many ways, including that in the mean time our paychecks will be bigger and our economy will be stronger.