HKS Affiliated Authors
Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy
Excerpt
Excerpt
‘Not much’: What macroeconomic data say about the impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Jason Furman, September 18, 2019, Opinion, "What does macroeconomic data since the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) tell us about its impact on business investment and thus the future growth of the US economy? Not much. The first sense in which the data tell us “not much” is quite literal. The TCJA does not appear to have had nearly as much impact as many of its biggest cheerleaders expected and thought they saw in the data in the initial months after it passed. We now have six quarters of data since the law passed, and gross domestic product (GDP) has grown at an annualized rate of 2.5 percent in that period. That is a slight slowdown from the 2.6 percent annual rate in the six quarters leading up to the law’s passage, as shown in the chart below. This reflects the slowdown across consumption, business investment, and residential investment—which was only partly offset by the increase in government spending." Link