“Trump’s tax cuts are rocketing us into the debt ceiling,” wrote Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post on February 1, because “withholding from employee paychecks will drop starting no later than mid‐February. Individual income tax revenue will therefore be about $10 billion to $15 billion less per month than the CBO previously estimated.” The suggestion that the debt crisis could be blamed on a mere $10–15 billion cut in monthly withholding got a Twitter shout‐out from budget hawk Stan Collender, who must know that errors in monthly budget estimates are commonly larger than that.
This was followed two days later by Heather Long’s extremely misleading Washington Post story, “The U.S. Government Is Set To Borrow Nearly $1 Trillion This Year, an 84 Percent Jump from Last Year.” The article goes on to say, “Treasury mainly attributed the [$436 billion debt] increase to the ‘fiscal outlook.’ The Congressional Budget Office was blunter. In a report this week, the CBO said tax receipts are going to be lower because of the new tax law.” According to that link to another Post story, “CBO said that the tax law is expected to lower tax receipts by $10 billion to $15 billion per month. Even though the tax cut law went into effect January 1, the large drop in tax receipts didn’t kick in yet because companies won’t start using new withholding tables until sometime in February.” Fiscal 2018 began last October, so lower withholding tax can affect no more than 8 of the remaining months. Contrary to the Rampell‐Long theory, the CBO’s revenue loss of $80–120 billion can’t explain her alleged $436 billion increase in Treasury borrowing.”
Where did all that added debt come from? What Ms. Long initially called “the exact” figure of $955 billion is later explained as “determined from a survey of bond market participants.” Asking about 23 bond dealers to guess Treasury “net marketable borrowing” is far from an official estimate, and it isn’t a measure of the deficit.