PolitiFact finally found time to fact-check a Democrat on Tuesday. Unfortunately, writer Louis Jacobson refused to give Washington Sen. Patty Murray’s false claim a false rating when she declared that, since 2001, GOP tax cuts have done more than anything else to add to the deficit, instead giving the claim a “half true rating.”
The specific claim from Murray came from a speech she gave on the Senate floor on February 20, claiming the Senate GOP’s budget is “not about balancing the budget. We all know that. Because they don’t plan to reverse one of the biggest drivers of the debt: Republican tax cuts. Despite all the boogeymen the Republicans like to point to as driving the national debt, the reality is that the single biggest driver of our national debt since 2001 has been Republican tax cuts."
The reason why Jacobson gave Murray a half true rating wasn’t because of the “tax cuts” part, but the “GOP” part. He wrote, “the tax cuts were enacted not only by Republicans; when the laws were extended, much of the debt they spurred was also ratified by congressional Democrats, President Barack Obama, or both. In fact, of five tax cut bills enacted since 2001, Murray ended up voting for two, the first directly and the second by not objecting to the unanimous consent motion.”
However, in the preceding paragraph Jacobson defended the attack on tax cuts, “A 2024 analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscally hawkish group, found that tax cuts were the biggest of four types of legislation that have added to the federal debt since 2001. Two other types of legislation trailed close behind tax cuts in fiscal impact: large stimulus bills and annual spending increases.”
Sounds convincing, but there’s just one problem. Normally, when this debate is had, tax cuts are one category and spending is another, but RFB and Jacobson, split spending into three separate categories. Meanwhile, every tax cut or tax cut extension was thrown into the same category.
As Jacobson’s pie chart tells it $8.4 trillion (38 percent) was spent on tax cuts, $6.8 trillion (31 percent) on recession responses, $5.9 trillion (26 percent) on new discretionary spending, and $1.1 trillion (5 percent) on Medicare expansion.
However, if tax cuts and spending were treated the same, the pie chart would have had new spending at $13.8 trillion (62 percent) and tax cuts at $6.8 trillion (38 percent).
There’s a second problem with RFB and Jacobson’s analysis, mainly that it “did not factor in additional spending for mandatory programs such as Social Security because they were authorized before the 2001 cutoff.”
Okay, but the increase in spending is still real.