All the Promises Republicans Cannot Keep
The tax overhaul the Senate approved on Saturday rests on a shaky stack of promises Republicans will be hard-pressed to keep.
Foremost are the two central assurances GOP senators made to justify passage of the bill, which may be irreconcilable with each other. First, Republicans have insisted that the measure’s $1.4 trillion cost would disappear under a bustle of economic activity—more jobs, higher wages, and buckets full of new tax revenue flowing into the government.
“The plan will pay for itself with growth,”, a claim that he and other administration officials and Republicans repeated throughout the summer and fall. They made this assertion despite all available evidence to the contrary—the past experiences of the federal tax cuts enacted under George W. Bush and the more recent ; independent analyses by the , the , and other outside arbiters; and, most flagrantly, by Congress’s own in-house analysts at the Joint Committee on Taxation, who that the Senate bill would provide a tepid boost to economic growth and would recoup barely one-third of its cost over 10 years.
