GOP tax bill author admits it doesn't pay for itself -- contradicting key Republican talking point

At the Fiscal Summit on Tuesday, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) admitted that the GOP tax cut bill does not pay for itself — and that we won't even know how much the bill cost for up to a decade.

"We will know in year 8, 9 or 10 what revenues it brought in," said Brady. He continued to fiercely defend the bill, saying, "I don't think anything could have been worse for the deficit than to stick with the old economy and stick with the tax code that was so outdated," even after admitting he didn't really have any basis for claiming it was self-funding.

Brady, the former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was a key architect of the bill, dubbed the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act," which was hastily written and passed at the end of 2017 without a single Democratic vote.

During the debate, Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) insisted the bill would pay for itself by creating enough growth to broaden the tax base.

Subsequent studies have found that the growth generated by the bill was way too small to pay for itself — and the top 1 percent of income earners got some 83 percent of the direct gain, while workers saw nearly no pay increase at all.

Republicans initially hoped the tax cuts would allow them to run on the offensive against Democrats in 2018. Instead they quickly retreated from the bill as polling showed much of the public hated the cuts.