Kudlow, others differ on deficit estimates
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser said Friday that the federal deficit is “coming down rapidly,” contradicting estimates by nonpartisan analysts, Congress’s official scorekeeper and a branch of the White House.
Larry Kudlow, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said on Fox Business that stronger economic growth was cre- ating enough new tax revenue to bring down the deficit.
“The deficit — which was one of the other criticisms (of the GOP tax law) — is coming down, and it’s coming down rapidly,” Kudlow said. “It’s throwing up enormous amounts of new tax revenue.”
It’s hard to know where Kudlow is getting his numbers from.
The deficit from January through April was $161 billion, according to Treasury, up from $135 billion at the same point last year.
It will deteriorate further, since the Treasury collects a large amount of tax revenue in April when taxes are due for most.
Kudlow may have been referring to a Congressional Budget Office report earlier this week that said the long-term deficit would be smaller than its estimate in 2017, partly because of revised downward estimates of health care spending.
But it made clear that deficits are still set to rise in the near and long term.
“(T)he federal budget deficit, relative to the size of the economy, would grow substantially over the next several years, stabilize for a few years, and then grow again over the rest of the 30-year period,” the CBO said, projecting that deficits as a percentage of the economy would rise from 3.9 percent in 2018 to 9.5 percent in 2048.
Commenting specifically on the 2017 tax law, the CBO said it would increase deficits by $1.27 trillion over the next decade.