It reduced tax rates for businesses and individuals, with business tax cuts to be permanent and individual tax cuts set to expire after 2025, and eliminated the Affordable Care Act's individual requirement to obtain health insurance.[226][227] The Trump administration claimed that the act would either increase tax revenues or pay for itself by prompting economic growth. Instead, revenues in 2018 were 7.6 percent lower than projected.[228]
Despite a campaign promise to eliminate the national debt in eight years, Trump approved large increases in government spending and the 2017 tax cut. As a result, the federal budget deficit increased by almost 50%, to nearly $1 trillion in 2019.[229] Under Trump, the U.S. national debt increased by 39 percent, reaching $27.75 trillion by the end of his term; the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio also hit a post-World War II high.[230] Trump also failed to deliver the $1 trillion infrastructure spending plan on which he had campaigned.[231]
Trump is the only modern U.S. president to leave office with a smaller workforce, by 3 million, than when he took office.