Trump’s budget: Making the deficit great again
His proposals are a series of puzzle pieces that don’t fit together into a coherent whole, according to experts on both sides of the aisle.
Donald Trump’s bare-bones tax plan would cut rates — but add more than $10 trillion to the debt. His goal to trim the national debt to zero in eight years would require slashing all federal spending by two-thirds, even if he ditched the proposed tax cut. And he’s got no plans to trim Medicare or Social Security, the main drivers of spending
.. And like most Republicans, Trump has pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act to save money, but the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said doing so would increase budget deficits by $137 billion over the next decade — and, according to a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study in June, would also cause 24 million people to lose their health insurance.
.. The main drivers of economic harm, Moody’s said, would be increased debt, higher interest rates, a contracting labor force — due to mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — and the impact of proposed tariffs on Chinese and Mexican imports.
.. “Trump repeatedly, blatantly and knowingly makes up or gravely distorts facts to support his positions or create populist divisions,” Paulson wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post, in which he announced his intention to vote for Hillary Clinton. “Simply put, a Trump presidency is unthinkable.”
.. “The last super successful businessman elected to be president on that credential was Herbert Hoover,” said Holtz-Eakin. “Things didn’t go very well for him.”