When President Donald Trump took office in 2017, economists around the world had accepted the fact that the US economy had entered the “new normal” where economic growth would be low, and wage growth nonexistent. Trump’s team argued that deregulation, trade policy and tax cuts could bring us back to the old normal or, more memorably, make America great again.
The economy’s response to these policies confirmed everything Trump said would happen, and the Democrats’ rush to reverse his policies with their misnamed “Build Back Better” plan is the highest form of science denial.
Democrats argued, for example, that the corporate tax cuts would lead to a collapse in tax revenue. That hypothetical collapse is a key excuse for the huge tax hike they now contemplate. Yet corporate tax revenue in 2017 was, according to the Congressional Budget Office, $297 billion. The CBO now estimates that 2021…
