You'd think the Heritage guy would know

At The Hill, "Musk draws skepticism with call for $2 trillion in spending cuts" (3 November 2024) by Aris Folley:

Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the former president’s “pro-growth” tax policies would help “quickly rebuild the greatest economy in history while eliminating taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security for [hard-working] Americans,”

Richard Stern, head of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind the Project 2025 plan, also defended Trump’s 2017 tax law, while arguing that its policies “likely brought in more revenue than a loss.”

Maybe Richard Stern meant "more revenue than less". "Loss" is not quite the opposite of "more" revenue. And he stuck an extra word in there. Sometimes I think people mis-speak like that on purpose, mixing up what they are saying just a little so they have an excuse if somebody challenges them on what they seem to be saying.

I don't really know what idea Stern wanted me to get from what he said. But I think he wanted me to get the idea that Trump's 2017 tax cuts boosted the economy enough to boost tax revenue enough to more than make up for the lower tax rate -- exactly the idea that lies behind the Laffer Curve.

So what the hell, I went to FRED and looked up Federal Receipts. I set the units to "Percent Change from Year Ago" so I could see how much the federal revenue grew each year. Here's what I found:

This Graph at FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1z1Ao

In the area marked "LOW" the plotted line drops almost to zero (no increase from previous year) in 2016... rises just a little, for a 1.5 percent increase in 2017... back down to zero (no increase) in 2018... a 4 percent increase in 2019... and then a little below zero in 2020, the Covid year.

That's not all Trump's doing, not 2015, not 2016, maybe not 2017, and definitely not 2020. But in 2018 and 2019 federal receipts show very little growth. And there is no recession in that time frame to have caused the low. Hey, voters say the economy was good in 2018-2019,  and the media agreed. Politico (March 21, 2019) for example, said of Trump:

[I]f the election were held today, he’d likely ride to a second term in a huge landslide, according to multiple economic models with strong track records of picking presidential winners and losses.

and

“The economy is just so damn strong right now and by all historic precedent the incumbent should run away with it,” said Donald Luskin, chief investment officer of TrendMacrolytics, a research firm whose model correctly predicted Trump’s 2016 win when most opinion polls did not.

And if the economy was "so damn strong", federal receipts should have been higher than the graph shows. I think it was Trump's tax cut that (a) gave the economy a boost up from the 2016-2017 low, and (b) reduced tax revenues to the lows shown in 2018-2019.

So that's really all I had to say on this, except that Richard Stern must have been making things up. He probably wanted to make Trump look good. But Stern wasn't guessing about federal receipts. He had to know they were low. That's why he said likely brought in more revenue, to cover his ass.

As the FRED graph shows, the Laffer Curve did not bring in more revenue under Trump.

Oh -- and I want to point out that the Heritage Foundation, for tax purposes, is a charity. Somehow, that just doesn't seem right.