Getty Images Donald Trump has made another promise
President Donald Trump layered on another promise to his newfound insistence that he’s working with Congressional leaders on a 10% middle-income tax cut — that it wouldn’t raise the deficit.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal late Tuesday, Trump said his plan would be “revenue neutral.” But he wouldn’t divulge details on how exactly — or how, in vague terms — that would be accomplished.
As MarketWatch pointed out, any plan to cut middle-income taxes by the order of magnitude he’s described would cost, before the impact of economic growth, over $80 billion per year. Even a generous scoring of the economic impact would take the cost down to somewhere in the region of $60 billion to $70 billion each year.
Read: Here’s an estimate of how much Trump’s 10% tax-cut idea would cost
Over a decade, such a tax cut would likely be scored at costing around $1 trillion.
So where you get a trillion dollars from?
You could get maybe half of the way there from the president’s rejected proposal to vastly scale back the food stamps, transportation, foreign aid and State Department budgets. Another rejected White House idea was to pursue $554 billion over a decade in Medicare cuts. All these are laid out in Trump’s budget request for fiscal 2019. (And to be clear, they are spending cuts and not revenue raisers.)
Of course, it’s worth repeating these proposals failed to get much traction even in a Republican-controlled Congress. And cutting half a trillion dollars from Medicare, even under the rubric of cutting waste and improving integrity, would be a hard sell.
And in the past, Trump has simply dropped ideas that were unworkable. He laid out as president-elect the notion the Republican health-care plan would actually expand insurance coverage; the bill that passed in the House with his support did not.
And all this analysis assumes that actual legislation will be created and that the lame-duck Congress would want to take it up.
