If your goal is record-shattering expansion of deficits and debt, Trump is your man!
Finding A Politician Who Would Pay For What She Promises
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You don’t have to like the new government programs she’s proposing (a collection of new spending and tax credits aimed at addressing a long list of kitchen table issues). And you don’t have to like how she’d pay for it all (almost entirely by raising taxes on high-income households and businesses). You might be discouraged at her lack of interest in tax reform. And you might wish that she’d acknowledge the need to reduce the federal debt, not just stabilize it.
Still, in an election season when other candidates think nothing of adding trillions of dollars to the debt, Clinton’s agenda seems…almost frugal.
The contrast to her opponents is stunning. Clinton would add about $200 billion to the debt over 10 years, a rounding error in budget-world.
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Adding Up Donald Trump’s Campaign Proposals So Far
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The most costly proposal on Mr. Trump’s website is his tax plan. Three different outside groups – Citizens for Tax Justice, the Tax Policy Center, and the Tax Foundation – have estimated the net effect of Trump’s plan. Although all three organizations had to make a number of assumptions about the plan due to insufficient detail, they all came to similar conclusions about cost. Before accounting for economic impact, the three organizations estimated ten-year costs of $12 trillion, $9.5 trillion, and $12 trillion respectively. With “dynamic scoring” that accounts for potential economic feedback and assumes an 11.5 percent increase in GDP after a decade, the Tax Foundation estimated a cost of $10.1 trillion. After accounting for interactions with the most recent tax extenders deal, and absent more details, our best estimate is that Mr. Trump’s tax plan will cost between $9.5 and $11.9 trillion over a decade.
Adding these two proposals together and including the interest costs, we find that the total cost would be $11.7 trillion to $15.1 trillion over ten years.
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Finding A Politician Who Would Pay For What She Promises
---
You don’t have to like the new government programs she’s proposing (a collection of new spending and tax credits aimed at addressing a long list of kitchen table issues). And you don’t have to like how she’d pay for it all (almost entirely by raising taxes on high-income households and businesses). You might be discouraged at her lack of interest in tax reform. And you might wish that she’d acknowledge the need to reduce the federal debt, not just stabilize it.
Still, in an election season when other candidates think nothing of adding trillions of dollars to the debt, Clinton’s agenda seems…almost frugal.
The contrast to her opponents is stunning. Clinton would add about $200 billion to the debt over 10 years, a rounding error in budget-world.
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Adding Up Donald Trump’s Campaign Proposals So Far
---
The most costly proposal on Mr. Trump’s website is his tax plan. Three different outside groups – Citizens for Tax Justice, the Tax Policy Center, and the Tax Foundation – have estimated the net effect of Trump’s plan. Although all three organizations had to make a number of assumptions about the plan due to insufficient detail, they all came to similar conclusions about cost. Before accounting for economic impact, the three organizations estimated ten-year costs of $12 trillion, $9.5 trillion, and $12 trillion respectively. With “dynamic scoring” that accounts for potential economic feedback and assumes an 11.5 percent increase in GDP after a decade, the Tax Foundation estimated a cost of $10.1 trillion. After accounting for interactions with the most recent tax extenders deal, and absent more details, our best estimate is that Mr. Trump’s tax plan will cost between $9.5 and $11.9 trillion over a decade.
Adding these two proposals together and including the interest costs, we find that the total cost would be $11.7 trillion to $15.1 trillion over ten years.
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