Washington, D.C. — The Trump tax cuts, enacted in late 2017, disproportionately cut taxes for wealthy individuals and large profitable corporations. With a large portion of these tax cuts set to expire after 2025, Congress is debating how much of these tax cuts to extend and whether to offset any of the costs. A new Center for American Progress report explains leading Republican tax legislators’ scheme to mislead the public on how much extending the Trump tax cuts would cost.
To maneuver around the prospect of being held responsible for spending trillions of dollars on more tax cuts, leading Republican tax legislators are working on a scheme that pretends the tax cuts do not cost anything through a double-no-count gimmick, wherein Congress never counts trillions of dollars of tax cuts in 2017 or 2025. The double-no-count gimmick is a dishonest approach to tax strategy that deliberately hides the cost of the tax cuts and sets up cuts to programs that will hurt American families. This report examines how this denial of tax cut costs flies in the face of fundamental budgeting rules and misleads the public about how much extending the Trump tax cuts will cost. It also explains why having an honest baseline is critical to fiscal policy and the impact the extension of the tax cuts would have on Americans.
“The clock is ticking for Congress to make a choice on tax fairness and the United States’ fiscal path. Any extension of the Trump tax cuts should be fully offset relative to a current law baseline, not one that leading Republican tax legislators are pushing for that would hide how much the tax cuts cost. Congress should learn from its past mistakes when it extended a large portion of the Bush tax cuts. A bad extension of the Trump tax cuts is worse than no extension,” said Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress and co-author of the report.
Read the report: “Republican Tax Legislators’ Potential Framework for Extending Trump’s Tax Cuts Is a Gimmick That Would Cost More Than Advertised” by Bobby Kogan, Brendan Duke, and Sophie Cohen
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