This won't come as a shock to anyone, even the Republicans who have been lying through their teeth about their new tax law, but it's not going to pay for itself. No real analyst or economist said so before the law passed, and they're not saying it now. Even conservative economists agree that there isn't enough growth in this law to offset its costs.
The recent changes to the U.S. tax law will increase economic growth modestly but not fast enough to pay for themselves, according to a new estimate from a pair of economists from different sides of the political spectrum. […]
The net cost to the Treasury, after accounting for economic growth, would be $1.2 trillion over a decade, according to the paper by the Harvard University economists, conservative Robert Barro and Jason Furman, who was an adviser to President Barack Obama.
The tax law’s provisions would boost U.S. gross domestic product by a total of about 0.4% by the end of a decade, the equivalent of adding 0.04 percentage point to the annual growth rate. The incremental gain would continue beyond that first 10-year period, according to the study.
Republicans have this new tax law and pretty much nothing else, besides out-and-out racism, to run on in 2018. They’re going to have an increasingly hard time convincing the general public that this law is going to make their lives, or the economy, better.
But for the loyal base, they won’t have to. Even Barro still defends the law as "an important step in improving the efficiency of the U.S. tax system." Proving yet again that Republicans have never, ever honestly cared about the deficit.