With the economy remaining a top issue for most Americans heading into the 2024 election, a new estimate has found that former President Trump’s economic proposal may add twice as much to the national debt as his Democratic opponent’s plan.
The estimates come from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which shared on Monday that both plans from Trump and Vice President Harris could increase the national debt by trillions of dollars through 2035.
But while the analysis estimates that Harris would add $3.5 trillion to the nation’s deficit, Trump’s plans could add as much as $7.5 trillion.
The CRFB produced a central cost estimate for both sets of proposed policies from the candidates, as well as a low-cost and high-cost estimate.
The previously mentioned figures are the central cost estimates, while the high-cost estimates show that Harris could increase the national deficit by as much as $8.1 trillion while Trump could be more than $15 trillion.
The numbers show that under the low-cost estimate, Harris’s plans to right the ship “would not add to the debt,” but Trump’s low-cost estimate says he would add at least $1.45 trillion.
The group examined the policies being proposed by the candidates, finding that the most expensive was Trump’s proposals to extend and modify parts of his 2017 tax law, adding an estimated $5.3 trillion. Harris’s proposal to extend parts of that same plan would cost almost $3 trillion from 2026 to 2035.
As more policies are rolled out from the candidates, the committee said it would update its analysis in the coming weeks. Still, the estimates are said to have a “high degree of uncertainty” as questions continue to swirl about economic policies being proposed by Trump and Harris.
The group says it “relied on candidate statements, campaign feedback, past budget proposals, and other sources for enough detail to credibly estimate the potential costs or savings and in most cases have produced wide-ranging estimates that reflect many different potential policy choices.”
Currently, the national debt sits at $35 trillion, and if change isn’t enacted, experts say it will continue to rise.
“Under our central estimates, we find that Vice President Harris’s plan would push debt to 133 percent of GDP in FY 2035 – an 8 percent of GDP increase,” the group said Monday. “We estimate President Trump’s plan would push debt to 142 percent of GDP in 2035 – a 17 percent of GDP increase.”