Robert Kuttner

Robert Kuttner's new book is Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? From the transcript of his April 2018 interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross:

GROSS: So let me move on to a different chapter here. The Congressional Budget Office reported this week that the national debt is expected to reach more than $33 trillion by 2028. I don't know if you know the answer to this, but how much of that estimate is because of the recent tax cuts?

KUTTNER: Well, the reason tax cuts are $1.5 trillion over 10 years, supposedly some of that will be made up by increased economic growth, although there's no evidence for that. The Republicans have played this game going back to Ronald Reagan. You enact a tax cut. You claim that the benefits will be so great that they will pay for the cost of the tax cut. That's known as supply-side economics.

And when that turns out not to be true, you discover the peril of the deficit. And then you cut a whole bunch of domestic programs to try and fill in some of the cost of that deficit and rising debt. So that was done under Reagan, was done under Bush one, under Bush two. And now the same script is being repeated under Trump. And the obvious answer is to repeal much of the tax cut if we're really concerned about deficits and debts.

GROSS: The House is going to vote on Thursday on a constitutional amendment to require balanced budgets. I realize that probably won't become a constitutional amendment, but is it the same people who were behind the tax cuts that now want to ask for a balanced budget amendment?

KUTTNER: Of course. And it's complete inconsistency, some might say hypocrisy that one week you increase the amount that needs to be borrowed - which is to say the national debt - by $1.5 trillion, and then a few weeks later, you're horrified that, oh, my goodness, that's actually going to increase the deficit. And we better have a balanced budget amendment. And, of course, if you ever had a balanced budget requirement, you would never have been able to have that tax cut.

I think the sponsors of the tax cut are vulnerable because...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue