Projected to cost $4,200,000,000,000

Senate GOP’s tax cuts projected to cost $4.2T — with costly SALT deal pending

The price tag by the Joint Tax Committee is substantially higher than one calculated under an accounting method favored by Republicans.

Brian Faler

Senate Republicans’ tax package would cost $4.2 trillion, according to a new estimate that will likely create additional complications for Republicans as they race to get their megabill to President Donald Trump’s desk.

That’s already more than the $4 trillion that House Republicans say they’re willing to spend on tax cuts, and it doesn’t include the cost of a hoped-for deal to loosen a controversial cap on state and local tax deductions that would likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars more. It’s unclear whether the House will be willing to swallow the higher price tag.

The estimate also comes as Senate Republicans are scrambling to salvage a number of provisions meant to offset some of the cost of the legislation after they were rejected by the Senate parliamentarian.

Though Republicans have been debating their tax, immigration and defense bill for months, lawmakers in the two chambers have not yet settled on how much they can spend in total on the legislation — an impasse set to soon come to a head.

And, confusingly, the estimate is the second official analysis of the legislation in recent days — and is radically different from the first. At the insistence of Republicans, the official Joint Committee on Taxation also estimated the cost of the legislation using an alternative methodology that showed the plan only costing $442 billion.

Critics call that “current policy baseline” analysis a budget gimmick that’s designed to hide the true cost of the legislation. Democrats demanded the second estimate using the conventional methodology forecasters use to project the cost of legislation.

“Republicans claim their plan costs only $440 billion, but this new analysis shows it actually costs 10 times that much,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore) in a joint statement. “The Republicans want to rig the process and flout the rules.”

The dueling analyses only cover the tax portion of the package. The other parts will be analyzed by JCT’s sister agency, the Congressional Budget Office.

Amid mounting concern over federal red ink, House Republicans have been adamant that lawmakers spend no more than $4 trillion on tax cuts unless they can simultaneously come up with more than $1.5 trillion in spending cuts.