Photo : AP

The Republican tax cut, which stands as the lone actual big legislative accomplishment of the Trump administration, was sold on a bald-faced lie, and will cost our country more than a trillion dollars. That is the conclusion of a bipartisan team of Harvard economists. Uh... look over there, immigrants!


Honest economists—those who were not employed somehow by a Republican-affiliated think tank—said from the very beginning that slashing taxes while we are near full employment and funneling the vast majority of proceeds to the rich was a bad idea that certainly would not “pay for itself” through vague “economic growth” in the future. Republican leaders were able to completely ignore and denigrate these conclusions because Americans do not understand economics and it is easy to present such things as mere “partisanship,” both reasons why we are so fucked. Anyhow.

Now, a bipartisan team of economists—one conservative and one former Obama advisor, out of Harvard—has produced a study on the future effects of the tax cut package and found that, yes, it was a big fucking scam!!!!!!!! No shit!!!!!!!!!!


The authors find, in essence, that the tax cuts will produce a very modest amount of additional economic growth per year, which will not outweigh the costs of the tax cuts. The Wall Street Journal reports that “The net cost to the Treasury, after accounting for economic growth, would be $1.2 trillion over a decade.” Again, this finding is consistent with what many credible economists said before the bill was passed, and is notable mostly because it is now coming from a credible bipartisan team of economists.

This means that the entire tax cut plan was sold based on a lie (that the tax cuts would more than pay for themselves by producing economic growth), and that the president lied about what the tax cuts would accomplish, and, more notably, the president’s economic advisers lied about the effects of the tax cuts, and cabinet officials lied, and Republican congresspersons up to and including Paul Ryan lied, and now that their lies were successful, we will collectively be $1.2 trillion poorer, because we decided to hand that money to people who are already wealthy, and this fiscal result of a lie will be used to justify cutting benefits for the poor in the near future.

The fact that this colossal lie was just used to rob the public of a trillion dollars will not be major news this week because the people who care about it already knew it and the rest of the people are too overwhelmed to know they are being robbed.