Taxes

‘We knew we wouldn’t get 5 percent growth’

Written by SK Ashby

Congressional Republicans and the Trump White House said many fantastical things to justify their $1.5 trillion package of tax cuts for corporations and wealthy shareholders, such as the lofty prediction that it would lead to permanent, sky-high economic growth.

At least one former Trump adviser responsible for writing the talking points that Republicans used to sell their tax cuts says they knew we wouldn't see growth like that.

They were just lying, you see.

President Donald Trump is an "exaggerator" who knew his policies wouldn't generate the 5% growth he had promised while campaigning, according to Stephen Moore, who served as a campaign advisor to Trump and was a prospective Fed nominee. [...]

"I think Trump is an exaggerator, and I think it gets him in trouble," Moore later says. "It's like he said we're going to get 5% growth. We knew we weren't going to get 5% growth."

Moore was part of the economic team that put together the president's growth package.

We knew the GOP's tax cuts wouldn't lead to runaway economic growth, of course, but I suppose this helpfully confirms that they also knew that.

Republicans do drink their own Kool-aid and believe their own rhetoric about macroeconomics to some extent, but to an even bigger extent they're just liars who will say almost anything in their efforts to redistribute even more wealth to people who are already the richest people in the world.

The point of this post is not to point out that Republicans are liars because we already knew that. The point is to enter this into our little record of examples Democrats need to pull out when it's time to either roll back or replace the Trump tax cuts. The tax cuts were never going to deliver and the people who wrote them knew it.