http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-debt_us_57701efbe4b0dbb1bbbae2c9?section=Donald Trump’s policy agenda would quickly push the national debt to its highest level in history, according to a new report.
The analysis, which the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget published Sunday evening, represents one of the first serious efforts to assess how electing Trump or his chief rival for the presidency, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, might affect federal finances over time.
Rather than focusing on individual policy initiatives — like Trump’s call to abolish the estate tax, or Clinton’s pledge to help working parents pay for child care — this new analysis takes into account all of the candidates’ proposals to date, in order to assess how they would alter the federal budget and, ultimately, the amount of debt that the public holds.
It was not an easy task for the committee’s researchers, because Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, barely talks about policy. When he does, he’s frequently vague or inconsistent. But the few proposals that Trump has actually described publicly made it possible to construct a rough analysis and compare his agenda with the more detailed proposals from Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
The resulting contrast was stark. As the report demonstrates, the election doesn’t simply present Americans with a choice between a politician who disparages entire ethnic and religious groups and a politician who preaches the virtues of diversity. It also offers a choice between a candidate who’d create vast new deficits for the sake of some highly questionable tax cuts — and one proposing a more modest agenda of expanded government programs, with added revenue that would cover nearly all of their cost.
The centerpiece of Trump’s agenda is a series of proposed tax cuts, including new breaks for businesses and reductions in individual rates, that past studies have shown would disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans. The committee’s researchers, working from estimates by the (also nonpartisan) Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, determined that, taken together, the tax cuts would add something like $9.25 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years. (For these and other projections, committee researchers produced three separate estimates to generate a range of possibilities and then used the one in the middle for their main analysis.)
Other items on Trump’s agenda, including his promises to overhaul veteran services and repeal the Affordable Care Act, would add a few hundred billion dollars to that total. With no significant new revenues or spending cuts to offset these costs, and with the higher interest payments that so much new borrowing would require, the cumulative impact of Trump’s agenda would probably be around $11.5 trillion in additional federal debt over 10 years, the committee’s researchers found.
The number itself doesn’t mean a whole lot. The U.S. has carried significant debt going all the way back to the 1790s — when, at the urging of Alexander Hamilton, the fledgling federal government assumed liabilities that the states had incurred during the American Revolution and its aftermath.
