Trump's tax cuts have been a miserable failure even by his own standards: Washington Post business columnist

The latest report on economic growth in America showed that the U.S. economy grew at just 2.1 percent in Q4 2019, and at 2.3 percent overall last year.

This less-than-stellar economic growth came two years after the passage of a massive tax cut that President Donald Trump touted as a surefire way to push economic growth up past 3 percent.

Washington Post business columnist Catherine Rampell writes that the latest mediocre GDP numbers reveal what a miserable failure the Trump tax cut has been, even by the president's own standards.

"Congrats, we spent $2 trillion on a tax cut for the rich to get us back to almost exactly the average pace of growth from Obama’s second term," she writes on Twitter.

Digging further into the details, Rampell finds that the tax cut has also completely failed in its purported primary objective of sparking a boom in business investment.

"The mechanism by which the tax cut was supposed to supercharge GDP growth was by boosting business investment," she argues. "Business investment has instead fallen for the past three consecutive quarters. Is that decline because of the tax cut? Unlikely. But whatever very modest boost the tax cut offered was clearly not enough to offset Trump’s trade wars. CBO forecast this week that tariffs could reduce GDP by 0.5% in 2020."