Donald Trump on taxes: what the evidence says · JRE #2219
SUBJECT: TAXES
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
So I took it from almost 40% down to 21%. Now I'm bringing it from 21 down to 15, but only if you make your product in the United States, which is great. People call me. They said, what a great idea. Nobody ever heard of that before. I don't care if they make the product in Japan. Why should I give up? So it's a 21 that at 21 in the first year, we took in much more revenue than we did at almost 40.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Trump claimed that lowering the corporate tax rate from roughly 40% to 21% under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) caused revenue to rise in the first year compared to before the cut. Official federal budget data show the opposite for corporate tax receipts specifically: per the White House Office of Management and Budget's historical budget tables, corporation income tax receipts fell from $297,048 million in fiscal year 2017 (the last year at the pre-TCJA 35% statutory rate) to $204,733 million in fiscal year 2018 (the first year at the new 21% rate), a decline of about 31%. Total federal receipts did rise slightly in FY2018 versus FY2017 (from about $3,316.2 billion to about $3,329.9 billion), but that increase was driven by individual income and other tax collections growing alongside the economy, not by the corporate rate cut; corporate tax revenue itself did not increase and instead dropped sharply in the first year after the cut. The claim that the lower corporate rate produced higher revenue in its first year is contradicted by the government's own receipts data.