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Ben Werschkul
June 26, 2025
As Senate Republicans barrel toward votes in the coming days on President Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, they are using a controversial budget maneuver to hide $3.8 trillion in red ink.
This Senate-preferred accounting approach is known as using a "current policy baseline" and takes the stance that extending current tax rates should be counted as having zero cost even if they are set to expire.
What doesn't change is the underlying fact that those changes are projected to add trillions to the national debt if they become law.
The approach is being derided as an "egregious budget gimmick" and upends decades of accounting practices with trillions in economic consequences.
This bit of Washington arcana was front and center this week after the Joint Committee on Taxation analyzed the tax provisions in the bill using this "current policy" approach and found a total cost of about $442 billion in the coming decade.
But after economists untangled the math — and put things into the more comprehensive "current law" framework — the true impact on the national debt was shown to be nearly 10 times higher at about $4.2 trillion.
Article with chart continues:
June 26, 2025
As Senate Republicans barrel toward votes in the coming days on President Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, they are using a controversial budget maneuver to hide $3.8 trillion in red ink.
This Senate-preferred accounting approach is known as using a "current policy baseline" and takes the stance that extending current tax rates should be counted as having zero cost even if they are set to expire.
What doesn't change is the underlying fact that those changes are projected to add trillions to the national debt if they become law.
The approach is being derided as an "egregious budget gimmick" and upends decades of accounting practices with trillions in economic consequences.
This bit of Washington arcana was front and center this week after the Joint Committee on Taxation analyzed the tax provisions in the bill using this "current policy" approach and found a total cost of about $442 billion in the coming decade.
But after economists untangled the math — and put things into the more comprehensive "current law" framework — the true impact on the national debt was shown to be nearly 10 times higher at about $4.2 trillion.
Article with chart continues:
