Deficit and Debt
strike four
THE CLAIM
The tax cuts will pay for themselves. Not one penny will be added to the debt and will probably help reduce it. The deficit gap will not widen but probably shrink.
DJT on July 27, 2018, on The Sean Hannity Show, “We have $21 trillion in debt. When [the 2017 tax cut] really kicks in, we’ll start paying off that debt like its water.”
He said things like this repeatedly. As far back as his campaign, Donald Trump insisted that the federal debt and deficit would not increase from his tax cuts and the economy would “take off like a rocket ship.”
His Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin proclaimed that “not only will this tax plan pay for itself, but it will pay down debt.” Two years later, when this clearly hadn’t happened, Mnuchin stuck with his story: “I’ll stick with my projections that the tax deal will pay for itself.”
THE TRUTH
The first Trump administration blew out our deficit and massively increased our debt. Here’s how ProPublica – an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest – put it in 2021:
The national debt rose by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.
The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.