The Budget Trick the G.O.P. Might Use to Make a $4 Trillion Tax Cut Look Free

[Speedy]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025...rce=snacks&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=snacks_20250318&utm_content=2f7155494b36a94adfaed41e1f364107

How much does a tax cut cost? It depends what you compare it to.

Republicans in Congress trying to advance a giant bill that includes $4 trillion in tax cut extensions are considering a novel strategy that would make the extension appear to be free. The trick: budgeting with the assumption that current policies extend indefinitely into the future — even those with an expiration date, like the 2017 tax cuts set to end next year. It’s the difference between making the extension appear to cost $4 trillion or zero.

Using this “current policy baseline” wouldn’t change the bill’s real effect on deficits or debt. But it would make it easier to actually make the tax cuts lasting by sidestepping a rule governing budget reconciliation, the process Republicans are using to pass the bill.

Yes, this sounds technical! That’s why we’ve enlisted some of Washington’s top budget veterans to explain this maneuver using a metaphor. Across the ideological spectrum, nearly all of the more than 20 experts we heard from disliked changing the baseline. Here are some of their examples:

[cbelt3]

Lies. Got it. As expected.

They are grabbing us right by the social security and medicare.

[Acer]

I was told we were getting kitchen table economics, where money spent has to equal money coming in, just like Mom balancing the checkbook at the kitchen table. I don't recall Mom using "current policies extended indefinitely into the future" to buy groceries.

[pdq]

It’s a little like Well - yes, Dad and I got ourselves into greater debt by deciding to work half-time for awhile. Our income dropped from what it would have been, but that’s okay, we just put it on our credit cards.

Now that time has come where we were going to go back to the work hours and income of what we were had before.

But y’know, since it’s what we were doing these past few years, we feel justified in just getting some new credit cards instead. No harm in that, right?