Conservative economist Art Laffer, who loves the Trump administration’s economic policies, brought up the subject a lot of congressional Republicans have apparently lost interest in: The government is spending too much.
At Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., where Laffer and co-author Stephen Moore were celebrating the launch of their new book, Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy, Laffer said Tuesday that government spending is “way out of control.”
He said in a short conversation with me that it’s something he’s addressed directly with President Trump, who Laffer advised during the 2016 campaign.
“It’s a real problem,” he said. “It’s the one we haven’t addressed.”
The Congressional Budget Office puts the federal deficit for 2018 at $793 billion. That’s up from the previous fiscal year’s $666 billion deficit.
The CBO puts the public debt at nearly $16 trillion.
Laffer said, though, that he didn’t know if Trump would tackle the problem in his first term and he didn’t want to share what Trump has told him about government spending.
““You should ask him,” he told me. “I’ll tell you what I say. I say that government spending is taxation. I don’t want to tell you what he says. That’s not kosher, if you know what I mean.”
