WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump keeps adding new tax cuts to his list of campaign promises, and their projected costs keep piling up.
Independent analyses suggest Trump’s plans could add close to $4 trillion over the next decade to America’s already fast-growing national debt, even after factoring in additional revenues from new taxes he wants to impose on imports.
It is impossible to make a similar estimate for Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent this fall. She has not laid out any tax or spending plans, or other economic policy proposals, with enough detail to estimate whether they would add to deficits or reduce them.
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Total federal debt is now about $35 trillion, up from about $20 trillion when Trump took office in 2017, Treasury Department data shows. It grew by about $7.8 trillion on Trump’s watch and has increased by about $7.3 trillion on President Joe Biden’s watch thus far.
Deficit hawks in Washington warn that a further acceleration would elevate risks of an economically debilitating spiral, where rising debt pushes up borrowing costs in financial markets. That would then cause the debt to further balloon.
“It’s a lot more troubling now, because the overall fiscal and economic environment is a lot worse” than it was before Trump and Biden took office, said Marc Goldwein, the senior vice president for the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in Washington.
The next president will already be facing what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts will be growing deficits, spurred in part by more retiring baby boomers beginning to draw benefits from Social Security and Medicare. The budget office projects that the debt will grow by $14 trillion over the next decade, even if Congress and the next president do not pass any new tax cuts or large spending programs.
Trump has proposed several additional tax cuts that would add to those projections, many of them intended to appeal to voters struggling with household expenses. They include eliminating federal income taxes on retirees’ Social Security benefits and on the money service workers, like servers and ride-share drivers, earn from tips. He would further cut the corporate income tax rate to 15%, down from the 21% rate he approved as part of a tax overhaul package in 2017.
Trump also wants to extend expiring tax cuts for people and businesses that were included in that 2017 tax law.
All together, Trump’s proposed tax cuts would reduce federal revenues by nearly $7 trillion over the course of a decade, according to estimates and a tax calculator created by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The amount added to the national debt would be even larger than that, when factoring in additional interest costs for federal debt service.
Trump has proposed several plans that would offset some of those revenue losses. They include repealing the tax breaks for clean energy manufacturing and other low-emission technologies contained in Biden’s 2022 climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. Trump would also impose steep new tariffs on imports from China and a 10% tariff on all imported goods.
Other analyses project that the Inflation Reduction Act repeal and the two new tariffs could collectively bring in about $3 trillion in additional federal revenues, leaving Trump with a net revenue loss of about $4 trillion.
Trump has said he will bridge the gap with unspecified cuts to “waste” in the federal budget. Just as he did when he first ran for president, in 2016, he has claimed he will pay down — or even pay off entirely — the national debt. Most recently, he suggested he could use cryptocurrency to eliminate the debt. That is effectively impossible for several reasons, starting with this: All the bitcoin in the world is currently worth just over $1 trillion, nowhere close to the full value of the debt.
“Who knows?” Trump told Fox Business in an interview this month. “Maybe we’ll pay off our $35 trillion, hand them a little crypto check, right? We’ll hand them a little bitcoin and wipe out our $35 trillion.”
A Trump campaign spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment this week.
Harris, who began seeking the Democratic nomination late last month immediately after Biden stepped aside and endorsed her, has no policy proposals posted on her campaign website — economic or otherwise.
Biden released a budget in March that calls for about $3 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade, largely by raising taxes on corporations and high-earners. It contains large fiscal question marks, like how to pay for Biden’s plan to extend Trump-era tax cuts for people earning less than $400,000 a year.
Officials with the Harris campaign did not directly answer whether that budget is an effective blueprint for her agenda.
Her aides also sought to contrast Harris with Trump on economic issues while sidestepping questions about deficits.
Charles Kretchmer Lutvak, a spokesperson for Harris, called the election “a choice between Vice President Harris, with her proven record of fighting for working people while fighting corporations and price gouging to lower costs” versus Trump’s “plan to cut taxes for the ultrawealthy and big corporations.”
Asked for details on Harris’ fiscal platform, campaign officials referred to her stump speech, including recent remarks in Atlanta. In them, Harris discusses tax and spending plans only in broad terms, including promises for “affordable health care, affordable child care, paid leave.” She offers no details that would allow for even a ballpark estimate of the costs of her agenda.
Since she became the nominee, Harris does not appear to have mentioned budget deficits or the federal debt in any remarks.
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