WASHINGTON — The Trump administration pushed a $1.5 trillion tax cut through Congress in 2017 on the promise that it would spark sustained economic growth. While the tax cuts have goosed the economy in the short term, officials now concede they will not be enough to deliver the 3 percent annual growth the president promised over the long term.
To produce that average growth rate for the next decade, White House forecasters say, the American economy would need additional rollbacks in labor regulations, a $1 trillion infrastructure plan and another round of tax cuts.
Getting all those policies implemented would be highly unlikely, given a divided Congress and a ballooning federal deficit, which could limit lawmakers’ appetite to spend money on a new tax cut or infrastructure plan.
But without those additional steps, the president’s economic team predicts in a report released on Tuesday that growth would slow to about 2 percent a year in 2026. That is the year when many of the individual tax cuts included in the 2017 law are set to expire, essentially producing a tax increase for millions of Americans.
