Stephen Moore, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic advisor to presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, is blasting a report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that criticized Trump’s economic plan by arguing it “would significantly worsen the debt.”
“The main point that’s so fallacious about this committee report is they don’t know what the plan is,” Moore responded. “I’m involved with a couple other people with helping write the tax plan and the fiscal plan and we’re only half way done with it, so how can they score something that doesn’t even exist?”
“Trump’s proposals would massively increase the debt,” the roughly 50-page report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a non-profit organization, concludes after comparing Trump’s plan to presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
By our central estimate, Clinton would add $250 billion to the debt over the next decade while Trump would add $11.5 trillion. As a result, debt would rise from 75 percent of GDP today to 87 percent by 2026 under Clinton’s policies and 127 percent under Trump’s policies.
“Hillary was part of the Obama administration. Obama borrowed more money from every president from George Washington to George W. Bush,” Moore mocked the report, calling the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget hypocritical.
“They actually endorsed the $830 debt bomb that Obama dropped on the country in January 2009 — this so called stimulus bill. They’re supposed to be a group that stands for responsible budgets and they backed the bill that gave us the biggest one year deficit in American history,” Moore charged.
Moore said the report didn’t score any positive impact derived from Trump’s tax cut plan, which cuts taxes for nearly all income levels.
“If you cut the business tax to 15 percent, we estimate the tax plan alone will increase the gap by about one percentage point, so that’s an extra $2.5 trillion of deficit reduction over 10 years from the higher growth, but they don’t score it as any higher growth from this plan,” Moore added.
Alan Cole, an economist at the Center for Federal Tax Policy at the Tax Foundation, explained that revenue estimates are accurate within plus or minus 10 percent or so, saying based on Trump’s website, he thought the report seems accurate.
The main reason why we think this is such a large tax cut is that the specified plan greatly increases a “zero bracket” out to $50,000 for married people and $25,000 for single people. That is a lot of income going untaxed under the income tax. All in all, it will result in people paying far fewer income taxes, and having far more money to keep for themselves. The typical middle class family would pay several thousand dollars fewer in taxes per year, mostly because of that zero bracket.
Moore responded to Cole’s assessment again repeating that the plan is not yet complete.
“We have a new plan. I told the people at the Committee for a Responsible [Federal] Budget that we have a new plan that cuts the cost of that by two-thirds. They scored a plan that isn’t a reality,” Moore explained.
He said Trump’s plan will close loopholes. “We’re doing that now. We raised something like $5 trillion in more revenue by closing loopholes and they don’t take that into account.”
Moore also pointed out that Clinton wants to make the capital gains tax — a tax on investment — roughly 45 percent, much higher than the capital gains tax currently is under President Obama at 23.8 percent.
Trump wants the capital gains tax cut to 20 percent.
“Under the Hillary plan, you’ll get way less investment in the American businesses because they’re going to take almost half of the proceeds,” Moore added. “The historical evidence of this is very clear that when you cut the capital gains tax you get more revenue not less.”
***UPDATE***
The Committee for a Responsible Budget responded to Moore’s assessment of its report in an emailed statement to Breitbart News.
“We are encouraged by comments in Breitbart from Trump advisor Stephen Moore that the campaign will be updating and adding to its tax and spending plans. We hope that this will include a detailed proposal to tackle our nation’s large and growing national debt,” communications director for the organization Barbara Ann Clay stated.
Clay noted the report “found that Mr. Trump’s tax and spending plans would add $11.5 trillion to the national debt, driven most significantly by the $9.25 trillion cost of his current tax plan.”
She continued:
Three independent organizations — the Citizens for Tax Justice, Tax Foundation, and Tax Policy Center – have come to similar conclusions, finding that Mr. Trump’s tax plan would cost $12 trillion, $10 to $12 trillion, and $9.5 trillion, respectively.
As our report notes, our estimates are based on the proposals that the campaigns have issued so far. We will update our estimates as new proposals are put forward.
We welcome and encourage the campaign’s intention to modify its tax plan and to introduce new spending reductions in order to put the debt on a more sustainable path.
We look forward to these updates and hope that they move Mr. Trump’s plan closer toward our shared goal of fixing the nation’s large and growing debt.
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