Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC) put out a video last week attacking the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan agency that forecast the budget impact of legislation, because they found President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" of tax cuts will add over $2 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. This follows a number of other Republicans pushing similar claims that the CBO cannot be trusted or is in some way biased.
But Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler found no fewer than "nine errors in 60 seconds" of his video.
To begin with, Scott proclaimed, “In 2017, the CBO said the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would increase the deficit and debt by trillions of dollars. What would happen? They were wrong.” But, wrote Kessler, "By any objective measure, the CBO was right and Scott is wrong ... CBO first estimated an increase in the deficit of $1.5 trillion over 10 years — though that score was artificially reduced because lawmakers decided to terminate the tax cut after nine years." This ultimately wasn't the exact number, but the CBO was right that even factoring in purported economic growth from tax cuts, the bill did not pay for itself.
Scott then claimed that the CBO was "wrong on the Mellon tax cuts in the 1930s" — which actually passed in the 1920s, and fully 50 years before the CBO was even founded, so obviously it didn't score those tax cuts at all. He also claimed the office wrong on the Kennedy tax cuts in the 1960s — again, before the CBO was founded — and the Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s, which in reality actually ended up costing more than the CBO estimated.
He then claimed that the CBO failed to account for Trump's 2017 tax cut bill growing revenue 3 percent year on year between 2018-20, even though the CBO actually predicted just that — and he claimed that the "Laffer Curve" proves "If you lower taxes ... that means more revenue for the government," even though conservative economist Art Laffer wrote, “The Laffer Curve itself does not say whether a tax cut will raise or lower revenues.”
Scott concluded the video by proclaiming, “CBO? Wrong then, wrong now.”
"Since every example cited by Scott has failed to show the CBO was wrong, this last line counts as the ninth error in 60 seconds," Kessler concluded. "Maybe that counts as an achievement in Scott’s office. We’d give it Four Pinocchios."
