The Black Hole of Trumponomics

Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, two advisers to Donald Trump, argue in the Wall Street Journal that the federal government would have just as much revenue with Trump’s big tax cuts as it would have without them (and so those tax cuts will neither increase the deficit nor require large spending cuts). They claim that even organizations which tend to find that tax cuts on investment boost economic growth, such as the Tax Foundation, are underestimating the benefits of Trump’s plan because they are not taking into account the pro-growth effects of his trade, energy and regulatory policies.

Ross and Navarro refer readers to a paper they wrote for the campaign to get a more accurate picture of how these policies would affect the economy. The paper’s method is to start with the Tax Foundation’s lowest estimate of how much revenue the Trump plan would lose, which is $2.6 trillion over 10 years, and then explain how each ignored factor -- energy, trade and regulation -- would eat away at that estimate.