This article was authored by Andy Puzder for Fox News on May 23, 2024
Allowing the Trump tax cuts to expire, as Biden has promised, will only exacerbate the government's spending problem
In a recent post on X, President Biden stated, "Donald Trump was very proud of his $2 trillion tax cut…. That tax cut is going to expire. If I’m re-elected, it’s going to stay expired." I’m unsure who writes these tweets for the president, but I hope it’s not anyone on his economic team – because this is just wrong.
Biden’s $2 trillion shortfall claim apparently originated in a May 2020 Tax Policy Center article. The article reported that, in late 2017 and early 2018, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JTC) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that President Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) would "substantially" reduce revenues and increase "deficits over its first decade... from about $1 trillion to $2 trillion."
Of course, the CBO and the JTC made those estimates before the TCJA had any actual impact. Trump signed the TCGA into law in December 2017 and it took effect in January 2018. The estimates assume it expires, as stipulated, in 2025. As with any economic projections, these estimates were educated guesses – and they guessed wrong.
We now have six years of actual data on how the TCJA impacted federal tax revenue and the deficit. We also have updated CBO projections for the next four years made with the hindsight benefit of six years of actual performance. Biden’s continued reliance on the upper end of outdated projections – as opposed to the readily available current data – suggests that he may be gaslighting in an election year.
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