"As we said, we're working on a lot of details," Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said during a press conference on Wednesday to unveil the plan. "This will pay for itself with growth and reduced deductions."
Dynamic scoring has to do with the "growth" part of Mnuchin's explanation. To make tax cuts that look as if they wouldn't put a massive hole in the budget, policy wonks estimate the future benefit of tax cuts to the economy after making a load of assumptions — including about
what a future government might do in response to falling tax revenue.
Those imagined benefits are then added to future budget projections, and — BOOM — you've got a healthy-looking balance sheet for America.
Now, you might think that so-called fiscally conservative Republicans would be opposed to things like this and that Trump might face opposition from his party.
But he won't. That's because there is a way to make Washington's budgets sound more sensible than they are. That's where dynamic scoring, much beloved by deficit hawks like
House Speaker Paul Ryan, comes in.
The Republican-controlled House adopted dynamic scoring last year, but it's still up for debate in the Senate, where opponents like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont have been critical of the practice. They say it politicizes the budgeting process.
That's in part because there's no exact way to dynamically score anything. This is not a science. There's no set process, and there are no set rules on the assumptions made. For example, Mnuchin said during the press conference that his office was playing with a bunch of different models. (That's reassuring.)
@ Higher Learning being more concerned with the presentation than content.
Nevermind, increasing the national debt is fine."
