I used to subscribe to the same philosophy as you, that we should have to pay for our wars and even pass a balanced budget amendment, I knew that most republicans who lobbied for the same had little understanding that it would necessitate an immediate increase in taxes, somehow my side only thinks in terms of cutting wasteful spending and does not realize that the federal budgets are much more complicated than that.

Anyway when the debt skyrocketed right past $15 Trillion, I gave up and decided that the government would bankrupt itself long before the politicians would ever deal responsibly with the budgets and the unfair burdens that they were strapping our children and grandchildren with.

As far as an increase in revenue? There was no contraction in federal revenues, in fact there was an extremely modest gain, what remains to be seen is if future economic growth can actually increase the revenues beyond what they would have been had the tax cuts not taken place, unfortunately any study of that question will have to be done in abstract and will be open to political bias as we can not analyze an alternative policy that never actually occurred, we can only guess what the impact or lack of impact would have been on revenues by not changing the tax policies.

Due the math. The increase in revenues from 2017 to 2018 does not even match the rate of inflation. Hard to call that a win for either Trump or the Republican tax cut. And a hell of a price to pay for our exploding deficits.

Adding stimulus to an already healthy economy is folly. You add stimulus to a failing economy---as we did under Obama in 2009-2010, Now is the time we should be paying down debt, not expanding it.

The Republican tax cut did not deliver the benefits promised. And never will.