Republicans are hoping to hide the economic impact of Donald Trump's policies as they retake the levers of government next month, a business columnist warned Tuesday.
Many of the 2017 Trump tax cuts are set to expire next year, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that full extension of those would add more than $4 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade. That might actually be a conservative estimate, wrote Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell.
"The GOP’s first order of business: getting rid of math," Rampell, who specializes in economics, wrote. "The fractious Republican Party can agree on few things these days. But one of them is near-unanimous frustration with the pesky laws of arithmetic. That cutting future taxes would reduce future tax revenue, for instance, perpetually aggrieves them."
Trump's promise to cut corporate taxes and eliminate taxes on Social Security, overtime and tips would also add to the debt, but incoming Senate Finance Committee chair Mike Crapo (R-ID) argued that those costs should count because they wouldn't "feel" like change because tax rates are already low.
"This is like saying even though your car lease is up this month, leasing another car should count as free because you got used to having a car," Rampell wrote. "Alas, that is not how budgets work."
Rampell found the president-elect using similar "legerdemath" to claim the U.S. was "subsidizing" Canada and Mexico, when he was apparently referring to bilateral trade deficits with those countries, and the columnist said the numbers he cited were much larger than official statistics compiled by government agencies.
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"Trump and his MAGA allies have joined forces with some protectionist progressives in trying to change how trade figures are calculated to exaggerate the size of trade deficits," Rampell wrote. "This change may sound small and technical but it would massively distort how we measure and understand economic changes — and is symptomatic of Trump’s habit of torturing the data until it confesses."
Trump’s trade guru Peter Navarro and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought will both serve in key economic roles in his coming administration, and Rampell said both had past records of trying to "bully career statisticians" to cook the books in the former president's favor.
"They hint at what the president-elect, emboldened by a subservient GOP and friendlier courts, is more likely to succeed at this time: taking away the objective numbers that businesses rely on to make decisions, and that voters need to hold their elected officials accountable," Rampell wrote.