Still, Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said reducing rates is a more effective way to lower taxes than to create new programs, which is more complicated. “It’s too hard to tailor the rules to target the exact categories of people that we want,” he said.

Middle-Class Burden

The White House could also propose reducing the overall tax burden for middle-class Americans by about 10 percent -- a more complicated endeavor that would likely involve boosting credits, and comes with a hefty price tag.

Reducing the tax burden by 10 percent for those earning less than $75,000 a year would cost the federal government about $410 billion over a decade, according to an analysis of estimates from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation.

The effort could include expanding the earned income tax credit, increasing the child tax credit or reducing taxes on Social Security benefits for retired workers. Bolstering the EITC, a popular tax break for low-income workers, is one of the most direct ways in the existing code to lower levies for earners at the bottom part of the income ladder, according to tax experts.

Another way to help middle-class taxpayers would be to cut the 7.65 percent payroll tax -- which would mean the rate would drop to about 6.89 percent after a 10 percent cut. Unlike an income tax reduction, a payroll tax cut would help households that don’t have any income tax liability because they don’t earn enough.

About 44 percent of households paid no federal income tax in 2016, but about 60 percent of those have members who work and will be subject to payroll taxes, according to estimates from the Tax Policy Center.

Payroll Tax Cut

“If you’re looking at an 18- to 59-year-old working Trump voter, FICA is the biggest tax they pay,” Ryan Ellis, a Republican tax lobbyist, said referring to the Federal Insurance Contributions Act taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare.

Congress temporarily cut the payroll tax by two percentage points under President Barack Obama in 2011 and 2012. That tax cut cost about $111.7 billion in 2011 and slightly more the following year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.