Trump tax cut’s big price tag: Huge debt
The budget office's annual look at the government's long-term financial outlook paints a grim picture, projecting soaring deficits in the coming years, with debt ultimately peaking at more than 152 percent of the nation's gross domestic product.
"The prospect of large and growing debt poses substantial risks for the nation and presents policy makers with significant challenges," budget office Director
The federal debt currently stands at about
The biggest problem in the coming decade stems from last year's tax cut. It is estimated to increase the deficit by more than
And that's under an optimistic scenario. Under the tax law, individual income tax rates are slated to increase sharply at the end of the decade, while corporate taxes remain low. If
But if
The budget office did not offer a specific projection of the more pessimistic scenario, but the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, crunched the numbers and found that if the individual cuts were kept in place, federal debt would be twice the size of the nation's economy, and annual deficits would exceed 13 percent of the GDP over the next 30 years.
The impact of the tax cut comes on top of a pre-existing problem - the spiraling price of providing subsidized health care and
Debt at the level the
Rising debt also threatens to weaken the global power of
What makes the rapidly increasing debt particularly striking is that it's happening at a time when the
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