Congress’ official budget office said Sunday an analysis of how the Senate Republican tax bill would affect the American economy isn’t available yet, even as the GOP hopes to vote on the bill this week.
The Congressional Budget Office published an analysis of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act finding it would add roughly $1.4 trillion to federal deficits over a decade, in line with earlier estimates of the bill’s cost produced as it moved through committee earlier this month.
A macroeconomic score of the bill would provide a benchmark for a key claim of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans — that the tax overhaul will partly or wholly pay for itself by stoking faster economic growth.
Some Senate Republicans, such as Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, have said they will not vote for the bill unless credible analysis suggests it won’t add to the deficit, once the possibility of faster economic growth is taken into account.
Sunday’s report noted it is “not practicable” yet to produce an estimate of the bill that includes its macroeconomic effects. The experts that would produce such an analysis, the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, haven’t had enough time to work through it.
It could be weeks before such a dynamic analysis might be available. The Joint Committee on Taxation has yet to produce one for the House version of the tax bill, which passed on Nov. 16.
After taking control of the Senate in 2015, Republicans sought to institute macroeconomic analysis for major economic legislation like tax reform. They have long criticized static scoring, which gauges the size of tax cuts without allowing for the possibility that the economy could surge as a result.
Yet the GOP is, for now, headed for a vote on a major tax bill without a dynamic score in hand, leaving their members to rely on outside analyses. The ones available, such as from the nonprofit Tax Foundation, have found the Senate bill could partly pay for itself, but still add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit over a decade.
The Senate Budget Committee is scheduled to take up the tax bill on Tuesday, a preliminary step before it heads to the floor. President Trump is also slated to lunch with Senate Republicans that day to push for passage of the legislation.
