The economy under President Donald Trump is not nearly as great as he wants everyone to believe according to new economic reports and a blistering rebuke of his failed tax cuts by Washington Post business columnist Catherine Rampell.
A devastating report by the Washington Post this week revealed that overall economic growth in 2019 stands at a mere 2.3 percent, with the fourth quarter of 2019 only chiming in at 2.1 percent.
It’s the slowest growth of Trump’s presidency so far despite his repeated insistence that his tax cuts would lead to 3 percent growth or higher, a boast that economists across the country viewed with skepticism. And rightfully so.
Trump’s tax cuts, which he signed in late 2017, gave away trillions of dollars to corporations and the wealthy while everyone else received little or nothing at all. Many poor and middle-class Americans even ended up seeing a tax increase. The Treasury is now seeing less in revenues while being forced to borrow even more money as the deficit tops $1 trillion and the national debt skyrockets.
On Thursday, Rampell slammed Trump’s tax cuts for doing nothing to spark economic growth.
Congrats, we spent $2T on a tax cut for the rich to get us back to almost exactly the average pace of growth from Obama’s second term https://t.co/luUo4kyFIQ
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) January 30, 2020
The mechanism by which the tax cut was supposed to supercharge GDP growth was by boosting business investment.
Business investment has instead *fallen* for the past three consecutive quarters.— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) January 30, 2020
One Twitter user pointed out that Trump’s trade war also contributed to the decline in business investment, and Rampell responded by delivering bad news about future economic growth.
Is that decline because of the tax cut? Unlikely. But whatever very modest boost the tax cut offered was clearly not enough to offset Trump’s trade wars. CBO forecast this week that tariffs could reduce GDP by 0.5% in 2020
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) January 30, 2020
Clearly, Trump’s economic policies have failed the majority of Americans. The economy is not growing like Trump promised it would and is actually getting worse as the 2020 Election approaches. At this point, Republicans will have very little to campaign on. If they were hoping to brag about the economy, they should reconsider because the math doesn’t lie. Trump’s tax cuts and trade wars hurt our country and they will continue to do so if he and his Republican allies are re-elected.
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