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Article snippet: If one assumption has undergirded Republican economic policy for decades — and is the foundation of the Trump administration’s first budget proposal — it is that tax cuts will unleash fantastic growth. The basic idea is that shrinking the government’s share increases what people take home, encouraging workers to work more and investors to invest more. But while taxes can create incentives that can promote growth, liberal and conservative economists alike said there was no evidence that the White House budget announced on Tuesday would do so. “The assumed effects on growth are just huge and unwarranted,” said William G. Gale, a co-director of the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and a former economic adviser to the first President George Bush. The Trump administration promises to cut taxes, keep revenues steady and crank out average annual economic growth of 3 percent, but neither the budget nor the tax reforms previously outlined in sketchy form provide enough detail to figure out if that will happen. While the United States cruised along with 3 percent growth — and higher — in the late 1990s and mid-2000s, growth has not reached anywhere near that level since well before the recession. The best showing in the past decade was in 2015, when the annual rate of expansion hit 2.6 percent. In 2016, the economy expanded at an annual rate of 1.6 percent, the weakest performance in five years. Even as economies in Europe and Asia show signs of life after yea... Link to the full article to read more