So much for fiscal responsibility. Is this the "new math" that the GOP keeps railing against? White House says the 'big beautiful bill' will lower the US deficit. Analysts say that's off by trillions. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/whit...sts-say-thats-off-by-trillions-080040908.html The White House is making the case this week that passing President Trump’s "big beautiful bill" would be the fiscally responsible move as a flurry of analyses find otherwise and objections from some Republican fiscal conservatives continued to jeopardize progress. "There's nobody like me as a fiscal hawk," Trump claimed Tuesday morning as he headed into a Capitol Hill meeting with some Republicans who have criticized new spending in the bill. Other White House officials have gone further, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt telling reporters Monday, "This bill does not add to the deficit ... this bill will save $1.6 trillion." But the claims come as a variety of outside looks at the issue foresee a historic flood of government debt if lawmakers move forward and Trump signs the bill as is. The latest example came Monday afternoon when the Penn Wharton Budget Model offered a projection that took into account the bill's "positive economic dynamics" but nevertheless found an increase in primary deficits of almost $3.3 trillion over 10 years. The paper also found that the bill would increase the US GDP by 0.5% in 10 years. In a call with reporters Monday afternoon, Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) Chair Stephen Miran pushed back on the Penn Wharton Budget Model estimate, saying the group "had a track record of being wrong" while offering a vastly different estimate for economic growth. In his remarks Tuesday at the Capitol, the president said, "[W]e're going make a couple of tweaks," but pledged that the only cuts would be in waste and fraud as he pushed forward on what he touted as "the biggest bill ever passed." A White House report on Monday from Miran's CEA notably didn't repeat Leavitt's claims of $1.6 trillion in savings but said passing the bill will provide "long-term economic growth, job creation, and higher pretax wages and after-tax incomes for American families." In her remarks, Leavitt cited the CEA for the $1.6 trillion savings figure, but she appeared instead to be referencing a claim from Trump's budget office made in relation to the savings portion of the bill, with a White House official not offering clarity on whether she misspoke. Miran also said Monday that any analysis should include factors outside of the bill itself, such as revenue from tariffs, measures to bring down interest expenses, deregulation, and the savings from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). It was all reminiscent of a case that Trump and his team made back in 2017 during that tax fight — essentially, that the resulting economic growth means that tax cuts pay for themselves. The problem for the White House and its allies is that their calculations do not appear to be backed by the legacy of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, nor by nearly any other look at the current bill. Many projections of new red ink Monday's calculations from the Penn Wharton Budget Model — which also projects that the bill would increase the national debt by 7.2% in 10 years — come on the heels of similar numbers from other groups. The Joint Committee on Taxation, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Moody’s (which downgraded the US credit rating as a result), and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) have all reported similar findings. The CRFB also looked at what might happen if temporary but politically popular cuts in the bill are extended and found that the costs in that case could balloon even further to more than $5.2 trillion. Another look at the tax pieces of the bill from Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation found that section of the bill alone is set to cost over $3.8 trillion if enacted. That's split between $7.7 trillion in tax cuts and $3.9 trillion in tax-specific offsets. Miran and other White House officials maintain that the experts are wrong and noted Wednesday, "If you look at what happened to the Tax Cut and Jobs Act last time, it significantly boosted economic growth and real revenues in fiscal year 2024 were actually a little bit above where CBO expected them to be." He was pointing to how the CBO projected in early 2018 that revenue collection would total about $27 trillion in the six years that followed. In the end, actual revenue came in totaling $28.5 trillion, but economists — including those at the CRFB — have attributed the difference to high inflation and a one-time surge that came with COVID relief measures during the pandemic. In net, the group found that the tax bill did not pay for itself and that the law "meaningfully reduced revenue from where it would have been." Yet the case for tax cuts paying for themselves is one that Trump's team is reupping again this year, with the added wrinkle of things like tariff revenue and Elon Musk's DOGE effort. The evidence is thin there as well. Elon Musk is spending much less time in Washington these days after launching an effort that has had a very limited effect on the budget so far. In fact, a tracker of real-time government spending from the Brookings Institution shows spending in calendar year 2025 is slightly up from 2024 levels. Likewise on tariffs, government tariff revenue surged in April to around $17 billion but still represents only about 3% of all government receipts. And that tariff number may drop in May and beyond as Trump has continued to step back from some of his biggest tariff plans, including a recent 90-day deescalation with China.