Vol. 1: Trump’s Broken Tax Promises
November 21, 2017
President Trump and his administration have made a lot of promises about their tax plan, all of which have been broken or will soon be broken by the Republican tax plan currently moving through Congress. Here’s just one:
Broken Promise #1: Trump said the typical U.S. household will get a $4,000 pay raise, if not more, under his plan.
Politico: “THE $4,000 QUESTION: That’s how much President Donald Trump says his tax proposal will boost wages, thanks to his plans to cut the corporate tax rate and give companies a tax holiday on their overseas earnings. The combination ‘would likely give the typical American household a $4,000 pay raise — it could be a lot more than that too,’ Trump said in a tax-reform speech Wednesday in Harrisburg, Pa., our Colin Wilhelm reports.”
Reality: Economists widely criticized Trump’s claim of a $4,000 pay raise as “fatally flawed” and “irresponsible.”
CBPP Economist Jared Bernstein: “Thus, CEA’s new report on the wage-boosting effects of the proposed cut in the corporate rate from 35 to 20 percent looks fatally flawed to me. It is a literature review that picks only the ripest of cherries, ignoring the large body of literature that goes hard in the other direction.”
Vox: “Plenty of economists and tax researchers have argued that Hassett’s results are implausible and reach some absurd conclusions.”
Even the economists cited in the CEA’s report disputed its conclusions.
New York Times: “Mr. Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers said in a report released on Monday that reducing corporate taxes could raise average household incomes by as much as $9,000 a year. The top end of that estimate was based on work by a trio of researchers, and on Tuesday one of them, Mihir Desai of Harvard, said Mr. Trump’s team had misread the research. The actual income gain implied by his study, he estimated, would be $800.”