The Trump administration doesn’t want you to trust independent analysis of their “big, beautiful” tax bill.
The bill—now headed to the Senate—proposes cutting upward of $880 billion from Medicaid in order to make a multitrillion-dollar tax cut extension for multimillionaires and corporations more palatable to the American public. Trump’s bill is estimated to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt.
But when pressed by Fox News Friday to explain the massive expenditure, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent simply brushed the numbers off.
“You’re referring to the [Congressional Budget Office] scoring, which is 10-year scoring and it’s D.C.-style scoring,” Bessent said, clearing his throat. “We think that we can both grow the economy and control the debt.”
“What’s important, Bill, is that the economy grows faster than the debt,” Bessent told Fox Host Bill Hemmer. “So what I would tell your viewers to focus on, is what I’m focused on, is what [former] Secretary [Janet] Yellen was focused on, is what is total debt to GDP.
“We can grow our way out of this. If we change the growth trajectory of the country, of the economy, then we will stabilize our finances and grow our way out of this,” Bessent added.
The CBO is a nonpartisan federal agency that provides prospective analytics to Congress. On Tuesday, a CBO report of the House’s reconciliation package found that—if passed—the bill would disproportionately aid the wealthiest among us, lowering household resources by 4 percent for the bottom 10 percent of America, while raising resources by 2 percent for the richest 10 percent of the country.
But America’s finances are not stabilizing, in no small part due to Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff plan that has rattled U.S. markets. Last week, credit firm Moody’s was the last of the three major bond rating agencies to downgrade the nation’s score. Moody’s reported that it appears increasingly unlikely that the U.S. economy will be able to keep up with its rising debt and interest payments, throwing off what was once an unshakeable confidence in U.S. growth.
In the wake of the downgrade, Bessent once again urged investors to close their eyes and disregard the news, claiming that the lowered score was simply a “lagging indicator” of U.S. performance.
America’s national debt is currently more than $36.8 trillion, as of the time of publishing. Whether or not the deficit actually affects the economy is still in debate, but having investors believe in the health of the economy is critical.
“The government deficit isn’t a problem until investors think it is,” Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, told Axios Monday. “And they’re increasingly telling us that the deficit is a problem.”
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