During the debate over last year’s billion-dollar-a-year tax cut plan, supporters made a lot of big promises about the supposed economic benefits of cutting corporate and personal income taxes for wealthy individuals and highly profitable corporations. The problem—as many warned at the time—is that tax cuts almost never live up to their promises.
And that’s the point made in a recent piece by the well-respected Fiscal Times. In order for the tax proponents’ claims to be true, North Carolina would have needed to generate job growth that is significantly better than other states and the national average. According to the Fiscal Times:
The trouble is that the promised job growth hasn’t really materialized.
To be sure, with the U.S. economy as a whole adding jobs at a pace of 250,000 per month, there aren’t many states seeing a downturn in employment anymore. But the promises that went along with the tax cuts and reduced spending weren’t about keeping up with the rest of the country, but about surging ahead.
The Fiscal Times examined the job creation record of North Carolina and two other states that have experimented with deep tax cuts—Kansas and Wisconsin—and found that:
The dramatic tax cutting doesn’t appear to have done nearly as much for job growth as promised.
Wisconsin and Kansas, for example, have actually lagged the national average in job creation since their big tax cuts and budget cuts were enacted:
