Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #TCJANowWhat
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For @AEI’s #TCJANowWhat: A regressive, deficit-financed tax cut is not what the United States needed 1/ aei.org/economics/a-re…
Tax economists will spend lots of time in the coming years studying TCJA’s impacts, but its policy merits depend far less on the precise results of these studies than on the basic fact that it was a regressive, trillion-dollar tax cut 2/
Was delivering tax cuts to the relatively well-off the best use of the $1–$2 trillion legislators devoted to the TCJA, or were there other more pressing needs? 3/
I assessed what the macro data tells us about the Tax Cut & Jobs Act for @AEIdeas. My bottom line: "not much". Since passage GDP growth has slowed slightly as slowing consumption & investment growth only partly offset by faster govt spending. #TCJANowWhat aei.org/publication/no… 
The second sense in which the data tell us "not much" is that is the difficulty of extracting the signal (the effect of the tax cut) from the noise (the effect of the Fed, global economy, trade war, oil prices, fiscal stimulus, etc. etc. etc.)
A lot of sector-specific stories are important. This table tells some of them: (i) oil-related investment growth slowed dramatically as oil prices stopped their rapid rise; (2) software and R&D growth increased for reasons unrelated to the TCJA; and (3) everything else slowed.
