The Fringe Cause That Could Derail the Republican Agenda

We’re not even a month into Donald Trump’s new term and already, a cadre of Republican activists appears poised to fritter away his popularity and derail his administration’s agenda with a maximalist demand for a budget-busting tax cut. The Club for Growth, a free-enterprise advocacy group, says sustaining the big tax cut that President Trump signed into law during his first term must be Congress’s “top priority” because it “delivered record economic growth.”

That’s not true. Economic growth was lower in the year after the law’s passage than the year before. The two-year stretch that followed its passage saw slower growth than any other two-year period of the economic expansions in the 1990s and 2000s — not the kind of record anyone should be boasting about.

As a political matter, tax cuts simply are not a top priority for the American people broadly, the working class that now forms the core of the Republican coalition nor even the Republican Party itself. In a mid-January survey by Fox News, a grand total of 1 percent of voters said tax reform should now be President Trump’s top priority. A survey last year by my organization, American Compass, found that to lower the deficit, most working-class voters would want to see Congress raise taxes on corporations and on households with annual income above $250,000 before cutting spending. Even among Republicans, three-quarters of respondents believed that tax increases should be a part of any budget solution.