Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Will Cost $1.5 Trillion

According to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX), today's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will add $1.51 trillion to the debt, before accounting for interest or possible gimmicks. This cost would likely be enough to cause debt to exceed the size of the economy by 2028 – bad news for the nation's fiscal and economic future.

Of the $1.5 trillion cost, roughly $1 trillion comes from business tax cuts. Individual tax cuts make up another $300 billion, and the ultimate repeal of the estate tax accounts for the remaining $200 billion.

Within the business cuts, the legislation would reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent ($1.5 trillion), allow companies to fully deduct the cost of business investments in the year they are made through 2022 ($25 billion), and limit the top rate on certain pass-through business income paid on the individual side to 25 percent ($448 billion).  These provisions are partially offset by tax base-broadening provisions, including reducing the limit on interest deductions ($172 billion), eliminating the domestic production activities deduction ($95 billion), limiting carryover of net operating losses ($156 billion), eliminating the orphan drug tax credit ($54 billion), and eliminating private activity bonds ($39 billion). The business tax reform plan also includes a number of international changes which generate modest positive revenue, a one-time tax on foreign-held earnings of U.S. corporations ($223 billion), and a number of smaller provisions.

On the individual side, the plan would consolidate individual income tax rates to four brackets of 12, 25, 35, and 39.6 percent ($1.1 trillion) and repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax, or AMT ($696 billion). To pay for these changes, it would repeal the state and local income and sales tax deductions, limit the property tax deduction, limit the mortgage interest deduction and reform or repeal various other itemized deductions ($1.3 trillion). The legislation would also reform higher education benefits ($65 billion) and repeal or reform a number of smaller tax breaks. Finally, the legislation would repeal the personal exemption in favor of a larger standard deduction, a larger child tax credit, and a new $300 per person tax credit; these provisions would be roughly neutral when taken together, though the $300 per person credit would expire after 5 years and continuing it would increase costs.

The proposal would also roughly double the exemption for the estate tax immediately and ultimately repeal it starting in 2024 ($172 billion).

Source: Joint Committee on Taxation via the Ways and Means Committee.

Even the $1.5 trillion cost disguises two provisions that arbitrarily sunset after five years. The bill provides full expensing of investments and the $300 filer and dependent credit for only five years. Since the House leadership hasn't provided any rationale why these provisions would be temporary and the economic case for temporary expensing in the current economic environment is quite small, it seems likely that the expiration date is intended to artifically reduce the cost of this bill and set up a costly extension later.

A bill that adds $1.5 trillion to the debt is bad news for the budget. The bill will only accelerate the growth of debt over the next decade and beyond and make it much harder to put debt on a sustainable path.