Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the Republican tax plan unveiled this week will cut the U.S. deficit by $1 trillion, a claim disputed by at least one independent analysis.
The Trump administration’s tax plan “will not only pay for itself, but it will pay down debt” by generating $2 trillion in additional revenue, Mnuchin said Thursday.
“What we’ve scored it to is 2.9 percent GDP over 10 years, which is scaling up to 3 percent,” Mnuchin said at The Atlantic and Aspen Institute’s Washington Ideas forum. “We think that’s very, very doable; we think we can do higher than that, but if we get to the 3 percent, that’s $2 trillion in additional revenue.”
The tax framework Trump and congressional leaders released on Wednesday could add $2.2 trillion to the deficit through 2027, the Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, said. Trump has said economic growth resulting from the tax overhaul -- in particular a reduction of the corporate tax rate to 20 percent -- would cover the cost of the plan.