One of the budget proposals being contemplated by Senate Republicans would allow for up to $1.5 trillion in tax cuts.
The planned tax cut would not be revenue neutral and, as a result, some Republicans have advocated a tax plan that would ultimately pay for itself by eliminating certain tax breaks, according to The Wall Street Journal. While the possibility of $1.5 trillion in tax cuts seems steep in its own right, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania told the Journal that he would like to pass as much as $2 trillion in tax cuts.
One member of the Senate Budget Committee, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, said that writing the $1.5 trillion in tax cuts into the bill so that they only increase the deficit on a "static" basis could prevent their tax cuts from adding to the long-term deficit, according to Bloomberg. The upside for Republicans would be that this approach could not be filibustered by Democrats since it would occur through the process of budget reconciliation; the downside for Republicans would be that at least some of these tax cuts would be inherently temporary.
Johnson and many other fiscally conservative Republicans have tried to defend these tax cuts and perhaps even greater ones (Johnson has openly considered $3 trillion in tax cuts) on the grounds that they would cause sufficient economic growth to ultimately pay for themselves. As a result, they justify cutting taxes that would immediately increase the budget deficit by using a system known as "dynamic scoring" to project revenue gains from economic growth as offsetting the tax cuts' immediate deleterious effects.
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