Hey, big spenders — Trump’s plans bust the federal budget
The Republican Party is the party of fiscal responsibility? It’s been a laughable idea ever since presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have pushed massive, unpaid-for, deficit-ballooning tax cuts skewed to deliver the biggest benefits to the wealthiest among us.
The GOP under Donald Trump is insisting not just upon huge tax cuts that’ll slash government revenues without producing much growth in return, but on populist spending increases to boot.
The result is a perfect storm of fiscal irresponsibility coming from the party that’s supposed to care about balancing budgets.
Trump has been campaigning for president this year by piling promise atop promise atop promise, no matter how much anything costs. He’s called for cutting taxes on senior citizens, people earning overtime and tipped workers — while demanding a reversal of the unfair cap on the state and local tax deduction that he himself signed into law in 2017.
How will he pay for it? He won’t.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget did the math and found that Trump’s spending and tax-cut plans would increase the debt by $7.5 trillion through 2035. (That’s the middleground estimate. Depending on what happens with the economy, the new debt could be as “low” as $1.45 trillion or as high as $15.15 trillion.)
Compare that to Vice President Kamala Harris’ tax and spending proposals. The budget wonks say her plans would hike the debt by less than half of Trump’s. On the low end, they might not increase the debt at all.
The CRFB doesn’t speak alone. The nonpartisan Budget Lab at Yale and the Penn Wharton Budget Model also show that Harris’ plans would leave the United States with far less debt and far smaller deficits.
It would be hilarious if it weren’t sad that the same Trump whose plans will explode the debt is the man who in 1999 proposed a massive tax on the wealthiest Americans with the express purpose of balancing the federal budget. To quote from a CBS News report that November: “Billionaire Donald Trump is offering an unusual economic plan. He would impose a one-time 14.5% tax on the rich, to get rid of the national debt and save Social Security for the middle classes.
“He said the one-time tax package would raise $5.7 trillion to erase the nation’s debt and save $200 billion in annual interest payments. The $5.7 trillion is about two-thirds of the nation’s gross domestic product, a figure sure to raise alarm bells on Wall Street.”
Today, Trump looks at Harris’ plans to cut taxes on the middle class and modestly increase the capital gains and corporate tax — hikes orders of magnitude smaller than what he himself championed 25 years ago — and calls her a “Communist.”
She’s no Marxist, but Trump is no conservative on government spending. He doesn’t care about debt. He doesn’t care about deficits. He likes tariffs even though they may massively spike the price of consumer goods, which is something that he doesn’t mention.
