Kerby Anderson

During debate on the domestic policy bill (that Trump named “the Big Beautiful Bill”) one number was constantly cited by critics and the media. Now that the bill became law ten days ago, we will still hear it cited in next year’s election in attack ads against members of Congress that voted for a bill they claim will be a budget blowout.

The Congressional Budget Office claimed the bill would increase the federal deficit by $3.3 trillion over 10 years. The editors of the Wall Street Journal call this figure the “Great Budget Baseline Con.”

The CBO “score” of the bill would only make sense “if you assume that Congress was going to tolerate a $4.5 trillion tax increase. That would be the result if the 2017 tax reform expired at the end of this year, as most of the individual tax provisions are scheduled to do.”

Even the Democrats in Congress were not prepared to let all those tax provisions expire. They might have not wanted to extend the tax cuts for the top earners, but they certainly would have extended them for most other Americans.

The editors lament, “In any rational world, changes in the law would be scored against current policy. But in Washington they are scored against CBO’s current-law baseline, which assumes that the 2017 tax cuts will expire.” They concluded that there was much in the bill that deserved criticism, “but the $3.3 trillion deficit critique is phony—like Beltway accounting.”

I mention this concern simply to remind you to look at government statistics with skepticism. I doubt Congress will demand the CBO to change it accounting methods. And I think we can see that neither political party wants to do the hard work necessary to achieve a balanced budget.