Trump’s Spin on Tax Cuts Raising Revenues

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino. Former President Donald Trump is proposing to lower the federal corporate tax rate to 15%, insisting that when he lowered it to 21% starting in 2018, revenues received by the government actually went up due to economic growth it spurred. Economists say that’s not what happened. They say that while cutting the rate from 35% to 21% did stimulate some growth, it did not cover the loss in tax revenue. Vice President Kamala Harris, meanwhile, claimed “the Trump tax cuts blew up our federal deficit.” That’s a subjective characterization, but most economists agree the tax cuts did add to the nation’s rising debt. When the Trump-championed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect in 2018, economists saw an opportunity to test the theory that tax cuts pay for themselves due to economic growth. Six years later, Trump says the results are in and that the U.S. took in more revenue after corporate tax cuts in the TCJA. Revenues actually went down in the first two years after the TCJA was enacted, and then the pandemic hit — which muddied analyses of the TCJA’s impact. Revenues went up after 2020,...