Bad News For Donald Trump On Economy In New Government Reports, Even Growth From Tax Cuts Has Now Slowed Down

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump pledged that his economic plan would produce a 4 percent annual growth rate for the U.S. economy, according to a NPR report. Since then, he has repeatedly praised himself for producing what he calls “the greatest economy in history.”

But statistics have not supported Trump’s claims, and new numbers from the U.S. Commerce Department show that even the moderate growth that followed the 2017 tax cut package is now grinding down. In 2018, the economy grew at a rate of 2.9 percent, well short of Trump’s 4 percent pledge. According to the commerce department report issued on Thursday, in the fourth quarter of 2019, growth slowed to just 2.1 percent.

Growth for the entire year of 2019 slowed to 2.3 percent, a significant drop from the previous year.

According to a report by The New Yorker magazine, growth under Trump has been in line with the average annual growth rate over the past two decades, starting in 2000, of 2.2 percent, far from the greatest economy in history.

And even the mediocre economic results under Trump have come at tremendous cost, according to the New Yorker, with the U.S. taking on “vast amounts of new debt, which will burden taxpayers for decades to come.”

In fact, the New Yorker compares the current state of the country’s economy under Trump to his Atlantic City casinos in the 1990s, as well as New York City’s historic Plaza Hotel which Trump also owned — all of which went bankrupt under the weight of the debts he had piled on them.

Earlier reports have also shown that the massive Trump tax cut package, which was heavily weighted toward cuts to taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans and corporations, has not produced the widespread economic boom that he promised.

A report last year by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service showed that, though Trump said that the tax cuts would serve as “rocket fuel” for the economy, as The Inquisitr reported, the cuts produced no significant change to the taxes paid by the average American taxpayer.

At the same time, large corporations used their tax windfall not to reinvest in workers and new research, but mainly to buy back their own stock shares, a move that benefits only shareholders by pumping up the price of a company’s stock.

According to the New Yorker report, new statistics from the Congressional Budget Office show a $1 trillion deficit for 2020, a whopping 4.6 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.

The deficit, according to the CBO, will rise to $1.3 trillion by 2030, when the budget shortfall will exceed 5 percent of GDP. Except for a brief period during and shortly after World War II, the federal budget deficit has never exceeded 4 percent of GDP for more than five straight years, The New Yorker reported.