Congressional Report: Trump Tax Cut A Flop

A new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) confirmed what most analysts have known for a while: that 2017's huge, trickle-down tax giveaway to the top 1% and multinational corporations which was engineered by corporate Rethugs and their Great Leader, moron Donald "Rump" Trump, has been an abject failure.

The report, "The Economic Effects of the 2017 Tax Revision: Preliminary Observations," is a devastating rebuke to Rethuglicans and Trump who have been lying prolifically about the positive economic effects of their boondoggle for the hyper wealthy. From the WaPo article:

"Last month, President Trump revived one of his preferred descriptors for the tax cuts that he signed into law in December 2017.

'We promised that these tax cuts would be rocket fuel for the American economy, and we were absolutely right,' Trump said at a roundtable event in Minnesota.

He used that 'rocket fuel' line before the tax cuts passed, too, pledging that the cuts would inject new energy into an already strong economy. Sure, independent analysis figured that the cuts would cause the deficit to spike. But Trump allies pledged that the cuts would spur so much economic growth that the bill would end up increasing tax receipts, as people and companies paid higher taxes on their higher incomes."

And the results from the CRS report?

"In 2018, gross domestic product (GDP) grew at 2.9%, about the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) projected rate published in 2017 before the tax cut. On the whole, the growth effects tend to show a relatively small (if any) first-year effect on the economy,” the report's summary reads in part. “Although growth rates cannot indicate the tax cut’s effects on GDP, they tend to rule out very large effects particularly in the short run." (our emphasis)

Here's a rundown of the "Plutocrat Recovery Act" per the report:

• the cuts came nowhere close to paying for themselves;
• wages grew more slowly than GDP;
• money was repatriated from offshore tax shelters, but the money doesn’t appear to have been used for investment in expanding the companies, and
• “relatively little” of the repatriated money went to the worker bonuses that Trump boasted about.

As part of their 2020 economic message to voters, Dems need to keep this flop front and center as a way of explaining how Trump isn't working for them at all, only for himself.