Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has insisted for months that the GOP's tax cut bill will pay for itself and that his office would release analysis detailing as much, so where is it?
Treasury employees who spoke to the New York Times say there is no analysis.
Those inside Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy, which Mr. Mnuchin has credited with running the models, say they have been largely shut out of the process and are not working on the type of detailed analysis that he has mentioned. An economist at the Office of Tax Analysis, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his job, said Treasury had not released a “dynamic” analysis showing that the tax plan would be paid for with economic growth because one did not exist.
Treasury staffers say they've been instructed to run models on individual pieces of the tax bill, but not the full picture. Moreover, they say they don't have enough time to model the full bill because congressional Republicans are jamming it through too quickly. There's also the fact that we still don't know what the final bill will look like even though Republicans are expected to vote on in today or tomorrow.
Treasury staffers also say Mnuchin has relied on analysis from "conservative economists" outside the Treasury Department for a full picture of the bill since the Treasury doesn't have enough time to produce their own.
That should obviously raise red flags since we don't know who these "conservative economists" are or even which version of the tax bill they're prognosticating.