WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Breitbart News that President Donald Trump intends to bring “certainty” to the U.S. economy with tax relief and deregulation efforts.
Trump’s first term 2017 tax cuts — the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) — are set to expire at the end of this year, but Bessent is confident Congress will permanently extend the current tax rates. In addition, Bessent is also confident that Congress will succeed in enacting Trump’s additional promises of no tax on tips, no tax on overtime wages, and no tax on Social Security income. Bessent opened this part of the nearly 40-minute-long on-camera long-form interview by ripping the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for unsound analysis when it comes to tax rates and growth.
“For your viewers I want to make one thing clear too. We say that the tax cuts are extended, that for 35 years in my investment career I talked about CBO scoring and I never really understood the way it worked,” Bessent said. “Now that I’m on this side of the wall, it’s the craziest accounting you’ve ever seen. So, the tax cuts expire, but the spending that gets put through never expires? So we are seeing that we are extending the tax cuts when it reality it’s what we’ve had. On the spending, no one says, ‘oh you have to re-up the spending.’ That’s how we got into this mess. So, this is why we want to make — I’ll call it the current tax rates rather than the tax cuts — we want to make the current tax rates permanent and give Americans, small business, big business, American households certainty on what their tax rates are going to be. I think that that’s very powerful and will have a great stimulus effect.”
Beyond extending the current tax rates permanently, getting the other parts of Trump’s tax policy — no tax on tips, overtime, or Social Security wages — is how Bessent said Trump will further address the “affordability crisis” facing the nation.