Mark Whitehouse, Columnist

Trump’s Tax Cuts Aren’t Doing What They Should

Lower rates don’t appear to be stimulating business investment.

April 29, 2019 at 1:16 PM UTC

Mark Whitehouse is a member of the editorial board covering global economics and finance. Previously, he reported on economics for the Wall Street Journal and was managing editor of Vedomosti, a Russian-language business daily.

More needed.
Photographer: Troy Harvey/Bloomberg

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Remember the big corporate tax cuts of 2017? Wonder how they’re doing? Not so well, judging from the latest government data on the U.S. economy.

When President Donald Trump signed the cuts into law in December 2017, there was a lot of talk about how they would affect jobs and wages. But the real test of their effectiveness is whether lower rates encourage companies to invest more in things like factories, equipment and innovation. Such investment would both boost growth immediately and increase the economy’s productive capacity in the longer term.