White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow told reporters Monday that President Trump is unlikely to pay off any of the national debt, currently at $22 trillion.
“Whoa, whoa, it doubled under the prior eight years,” Kudlow said on the White House driveway, downplaying Trump’s responsibility for the current level of debt.
“Yes, it’s gone up a bit,” Kudlow conceded, but he argued that “growth is the solution to any debt issues that might be on the table — and so far, so good. Let’s just keep the policies in place.”
In response to a follow-up question about whether Trump would pay down “any” of the national debt, Kudlow indicated he would not.
“Paid off? No, I don’t expect so, and I think the issue there has always been to lower the debt burden on the economy, to try to bring that debt to GDP ratio down and our long-range forecast, you’ll see we have a steady glide path down,” he said.
[Related: National debt jumps to $22 trillion]
The current debt to GDP ratio is “a little under 80%,” Kudlow said. “It’s been a lot worse, it’s been better.”
Former President Barack Obama nearly doubled the national debt from $10.6 trillion to $19.95 trillion. But in two years, Trump added more than $2 trillion, a rate that could see him increase the debt by about as much as Obama if he were to serve for two terms.
Earlier this year, budget hawks expressed alarm at Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget, saying proposed spending reductions — such as a deep cut to Medicare spending — are politically unrealistic, and that revenue growth was pegged to overly optimistic 3% economic growth, higher than independent analysts predict.
“Trump was very hard on President Obama for adding debt. But Obama’s debt was largely because of a huge downturn. [Trump] is on course to borrow $10.5 trillion over the next decade during a period of very strong economic growth. So that’s considerably worse,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told the Washington Examiner last month.
[Also read: Trump budget calls for adding almost as much to the debt as Obama did]
