This week on Facing the Future, we discussed the potential fiscal impact of the Harris and Trump campaign policy proposals. Our guest was Marc Goldwein, Senior Vice President and Senior Policy Director at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). Marc and his colleagues at the CRFB have analyzed the Harris and Trump proposals to assess their effects on federal budget deficits and debt. Their most recent update was published on Monday, Oct 28th. Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson joined the conversation.
Campaign proposals are often aspirational without a lot of details attached. “Look, campaigns are not legislation,” Goldwein said. “Campaigns are not even presidential budgets. Campaigns are a series of promises, commitments, and claims that we do our best to translate into policy.”
To account for inherent uncertainty, the CRFB analysis gives a range of estimates for each policy, starting with a central estimate and including a low cost and high cost alternative.
“On net,” Goldwein explained, “we estimate Vice President Harris’s agenda would add about $4 trillion to the national debt over a 10-year period, with a range of $300 billion to $8 trillion or so, and we estimate President Trump’s agenda would add $7.8 trillion to the debt over a 10-year period with a range of $1.6 trillion to $15.6 trillion.”
These higher deficits, relative to the Congressional Budget Office baseline, would increase debt held by the public. As Goldwein put it, “If we do nothing, the debt will be 125 percent of GDP within a decade. Our base case for Vice President Harris is that this would be 134 percent and for President Trump it would be 143 percent. So to oversimplify a little bit, Vice President Harris would boost debt to GDP by 9 percent and Donald Trump would boost debt to GDP by 18 percent.”
Goldwein walked us through many of the specific proposals from each candidate. One notable commonality is that neither candidate relies much on spending cuts to offset the costs of spending increases or tax cuts. He noted, “a really interesting thing here is that spending is way above its historic averages, and continues to rise rapidly. Neither candidate would meaningfully address this, and in fact, both would make it worse. Both of them would put spending at non-emergency record highs because they both have spending increases, especially Vice President Harris, and neither of them have very much in terms of spending cuts.”
Both candidates rely mainly on tax increases for the offsets they propose. “With Trump, it’s tariffs and ending energy tax credits. With Harris, it’s corporate and high earners, especially wealthy investors. So they’re taxing differently, but both are actually big tax candidates when you look at the offset side,” Goldwein observed.
Another notable commonality is that neither candidate has put forward a plan for Social Security solvency. “Social Security is going to be insolvent, even if we transfer between the disability and old age program, nine years after the next president takes office,” Goldwein said. “At that point, under the law, benefits would be cut across the board by 23 percent. Vice President Harris does nothing for this, and, in fact, if you enacted her plan in the whole, it probably would advance that Insolvency day to make it worse by a few weeks, maybe in a few months, just from the indirect effects.”
“President Trump is actually significantly worse,” Goldwein added, “because not only does he do nothing to save Social Security, he gets rid of taxation of benefits that go into the Social Trust Fund. He gets rid of the payroll taxation of tips and overtime that goes into the Social Security Trust Fund. He reduces the number of immigrants paying into the Trust Fund, and his tariffs would boost inflation, increasing cost-of-living payments. So we did the math on that and we think he would actually advance insolvency. Instead of nine years, it would be six years, and the overall shortfall would be 40 to 50 percent larger. Instead of people getting a 23 percent benefit cut, it would be 33 percent under the Trump plan.”
Hear more on Facing the Future. Concord Coalition Executive Director Bob Bixby hosts the program each week on WKXL in Concord N.H., and it is also available via podcast. Join us as The Concord Coalition team discusses issues relating to national fiscal policy with budget experts, industry leaders, and elected officials. Past broadcasts are available here. You can subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or with an RSS feed. Follow Facing the Future on Facebook, and watch videos from past episodes on The Concord Coalition YouTube channel.
