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I believe I wrote on this before, but since I apparently didn’t stop the Trumpers from lying, I guess I will try again. The Republicans are insisting that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is out to get them and that they are lying about the benefits of the Trump tax cuts. They say that the cuts will lead to far more growth than CBO is giving them credit for.

CBO doesn’t get everything right, but they do try to be honest brokers. They use their models in a consistent way regardless of which party they appear to favor.

We can do a simple check of whether CBO has rigged the deck against Trump, we can look at what they projected after his last tax cut and compare their projections to actual growth. Here’s the picture:

CBO slightly overestimated growth for the two years following the tax cuts. (We can only go to 2019, since the pandemic knocked the economy off its rails in 2020.) In its April 2018 projections, the first ones following the passage of Trump’s 2017 tax cut, CBO projected the economy would grow 3.0 percent in 2018 and 2.9 percent in 2019. It actually grew 3.0 percent in 2018 and just 2.6 percent in 2019. That means CBO overestimated growth for these two years by 0.3 percentage points.

I suppose if the Democrats wanted to get Trumpian they could complain about the lying, cheating, traitorous CBO being out to get them. But for better or worse, they recognize that CBO is doing the best job they can with the tools available. And they came pretty close with their projections, even if they ended up favoring Trump somewhat.  

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