A story earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal perpetuates a myth and the Democrat narrative about the Trump tax cuts blowing a $2 trillion hole in the debt. We need to set the record straight in part because, after all, our CTUP founders had a big hand in crafting these pro-growth rate cuts.

Our senior fellow David Simon has shown that federal revenues ROSE to higher levels than had been predicted without the tax cut. There is no revenue shortfall. There is a multi-trillion dollar spending overage that unfortunately the debt bill doesn’t do much about.

Comparing these projected federal tax revenues with the actual federal tax revenues that were collected between 2018 and 2022 shows more revenue not less:

Greg Ip does get one thing right in the article: “Republicans don’t really have a beef with government debt. Their beef is with the size and nature of government spending.” True. Milton Friedman once famously put it: “I’d rather have a larger debt with lower government spending than the opposite. The true cost of government is how much it spends.”