Republicans Plan To Hide Cost Of Tax Cuts With 1 Weird Trick

The plan involves "hocus-pocus" math and potentially changing the rules of the Senate.

WASHINGTON – Republicans have a math problem with the massive proposed tax cut package at the center of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda. Their plan? Just ignore it.

The House Republican budget calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years. Trump, however, wants to make those cuts permanent, which would make their actual cost — and the damage they would do to the already $36 trillion federal debt — much, much bigger.

And following Trump’s wishes would make passage in the Senate all but impossible since bypassing a Democratic filibuster requires following strict budget rules and not increasing the deficit.

The solution for GOP leaders is to simply pretend a huge part of the tax cuts doesn’t exist. They want to use the “current policy” baseline, which assumes tax cuts — like the deficit-busting ones Republicans passed in 2017, the last time Trump was president — will simply be extended permanently even if that’s not what the law says. So, using this accounting, Republicans could claim that the tax cuts would be cost-free even though in reality they would increase the deficit.

Democrats, unsurprisingly, are crying foul about the GOP’s accounting, pointing out that it would fly in the face of their purported desire to rein in the federal deficit and the national debt.