NYT: "Trump Relays Putin’s Plans to Retaliate Against Ukraine"
And, who needs experts when we have the MAGA morons?????
What could possibly go wrong?
"Republicans Try to Discredit EXPERTS Warning About the Cost of Tax Cuts President Trump and his allies have united around a new foe: the economists and budget experts who have warned about the costs of Republicans’ tax ambitions." (NYT)
Even before House Republicans learned the full price of their tax package on Wednesday, one of the bill’s chief authors, Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, was sowing doubt about the accuracy of the estimate.
“I’m skeptical,” Mr. Smith quipped at an event last month when asked about the coming analysis of the legislation’s cost. “Unless I like the number, I’m against the number.”
In the bitter war over the nation’s fiscal future, President Trump and his Republican allies have united around a new foe: the economists and budget experts who have warned about the costs of the party’s tax ambitions. Republican leaders have set about trying to discredit any hint of unfavorable accounting on their signature legislation as they race to enact it before the president’s self-imposed July 4 deadline.
The latest estimate arrived on Wednesday, projecting that the sprawling bill endorsed by Mr. Trump could add about $2.4 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade.
By then, though, the package of tax, spending and welfare cuts had already ignited an intense wave of political attacks and recriminations. While Republicans scrambled to cast their proposal as fiscally responsible, Wall Street was getting the jitters about the nation’s growing debt burden. The tech executive Elon Musk, having left behind his role seeking to slash government spending for Mr. Trump, savaged the bill on social media on Tuesday, saying it would “massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit.”
Most economists — from nonpartisan government watchdogs as well as outside tax analysts across the political spectrum — have concluded that the bill passed by House Republicans, which is now being considered by the Senate, could exacerbate the nation’s fiscal imbalance while contributing less in economic growth than Mr. Trump forecasts.
But party leaders have rejected those assessments, choosing to present a rosier interpretation of their bill. They reserved their fiercest criticism for the Congressional Budget Office, a team of nonpartisan aides who helped to author the price check issued on Wednesday. Mr. Trump and his advisers have tried to paint the budget office as historically inaccurate and overly political.
The attacks are hardly novel. Democrats and Republicans alike have long sniped over official cost estimates in bids to defend their legislation. Nor have the Congressional Budget Office and its peers always offered accurate predictions about the permutations of legislation and the ways in which those changes could alter the trajectory of a complex economy over time.
But the Republican criticisms have taken on greater significance under Mr. Trump, whose administration broadly has looked to undercut experts in Washington while raising the odds that the party could advance a bill without a full reckoning of its costs.
“By trying to sort-of game the referee on these questions, members of Congress are going to miss the fundamental issue of whether this bill is an appropriate response, given where we are with the deficit and debt,” said Jonathan W. Burks, the executive vice president for economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, who previously served Republicans including former Speaker Paul Ryan.
A spokeswoman for the Congressional Budget Office, which is run by Phillip L. Swagel, an economist who served under President George W. Bush, declined to comment.
A spokesman for Mr. Smith, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, declined to comment.
The Republican bill extends many of the tax cuts Mr. Trump enacted in 2017, while advancing some of his new campaign promises, such as his pledge to end taxes on tips and overtime. To pay for these ambitions, Republicans proposed more than $1 trillion in spending cuts targeting a range of antipoverty programs.
But the cuts alone do not offset the total price of the bill, according to congressional findings, which align with other forecasts.
The Budget Lab at Yale, for example, found the Republican proposal could add $2.4 trillion to the debt by 2034. The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated it would raise deficits by $2.8 trillion over a 10-year period. And the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit public policy organization that supports deficit reduction, pegged the uncovered cost at $3.3 trillion over the next nine years.
All three organizations, which used different timelines, models and assumptions, found the bill would deliver meager gains in economic growth, which in turn would generate little in added revenues.
“It’s not just the congressional scorekeepers that find this bill would increase the deficit,” said Erica York, the vice president for federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation. “It’s everyone outside of Congress, too.”
Ms. York’s think tank, which generally favors lower taxes, found the Republican bill would increase the debt by more than $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years.
“And when all the models are in unison — yes, this will increase the deficit; no, it will not do much for growth — it really doesn’t make sense to triple down on the strategy to blame the scorekeeper,” Ms. York added. “The legislation is the problem.”