Opinion: It's official: The Trump tax cuts were a bust
Right before Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December 2017, President Trump proclaimed:
Itll be fantastic for the middle-income people and for jobs, most of all ... I think we could go to 4%, 5% or even 6% [GDP growth], ultimately. We are back. We are really going to start to rock.
A year later, its very clear that the tax cuts boosted gross domestic product and jobs a bit and just for one year. Its effects are fading as U.S. GDP growth appears likely to weaken in 2019. The only thing that rocked were corporate profits and the stock market.
And were facing trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made small cuts in rates to most individual taxpayers, while cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, expanding deductions for pass-through companies, and taxing only corporate income earned in the U.S., not worldwide. That theoretically removed a major barrier to U.S.-based multinational corporations repatriating the estimated $2.6 trillion in accumulated earnings theyre holding overseas.
Muted hiring, investment plans
The failure of the tax cut bill to achieve those intended results was made clear Monday when the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) released its January Business Conditions Survey. This is a poll of more than 100 economists employed by major firms in corporate America, so theyre hardly lefties. But they are guided by facts and hard data, not supply-side delusions.
Some 84% of these economists reported that in the year since their passage, the tax cuts have not caused their firms to change hiring or investment plans.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/opinion-its-official-the-trump-tax-cuts-were-a-bust/ar-BBSWBa5?li=BBnbfcN
BootinUp
(47,165 posts)Ohiogal
(32,006 posts)Great if youre a 1%er
Not so great for everyone else
C_U_L8R
(45,003 posts)Will magats ever learn.
lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)A fact for which the Russiapublicans will pay with their political lives.
progree
(10,909 posts)S&P 500 (far more representative of the U.S. stock market than the Dow 30, but anyway, the Dow 30 was down too)
12/29/17 close: 2673.61 (last close of 2017)
12/31/18 close: 2506.85 (last close of 2018)
Down 6.23% (down over 4% even counting reinvested dividends
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EGSPC/history?period1=1514181600&period2=1548828000&interval=1d&filter=history&frequency=1d
So the very heavily weighted to corporate and wealthy people tax cut couldn't manage to make the stock market come out positive.
Well, if one considers the scary roller coaster of the stock market in 2018 -- where it came within a hair's breadth of entering a bear's market -- which would have officially ended the longest bull market in history -- as "rocking", well it certainly did "rock".