Mr. Mnuchin’s Magical Math on Taxes

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Pressed by Congress and tax policy experts to prove the Trump administration’s claims that its $1.5 trillion tax cut would pay for itself by stimulating economic growth, the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy released a one-page memo that shows it can’t do it.

It projects a budget surplus created by 2.9 percent annual growth in gross domestic product over 10 years — that’s more than 50 percent faster than the most recent forecast by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Half of that growth would come from corporate tax cuts, the other half from other tax cuts and regulatory reform and from “infrastructure development and welfare reform,” neither of which has advanced past the talking stage.

Scott Greenberg, a tax analyst at the conservative Tax Foundation, called the one-pager “a thought experiment on how federal revenues would vary under different economic effects of overall government policies. Which is, needless to say, an odd way to analyze a tax bill.”

No other analysis — not from Congress, bipartisan tax policy groups, economists, past Republican Treasury secretaries — supports these claims. Instead, most experts say the bill would add at least $1 trillion to the debt.

In past administrations, the Tax Policy Office performed detailed work in analyzing proposed tax legislation, and its findings didn’t always agree with the president’s agenda. But career staff members have chafed under political pressure for months. While Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was publicly claiming that more than 100 people in the office were “working around the clock on running scenarios for us” on the economic impact of the tax cuts, career tax experts inside the office said that they had been largely shut out of the process and that such an analysis didn’t exist. James Mackie, the director of the Tax Policy Office’s Office of Tax Analysis and a longtime Treasury employee, has announced plans to retire at the end of this year.

“These people are dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrats; they are passionate about it, and to kind of have their views disregarded, I don’t think any of them have really seen it to this degree,” Austin Frerick, an economist at the Office of Tax Analysis who left in May, told The Times. “That’s where the frustration comes.”

Treasury’s inspector general office has begun an inquiry into the tax plan analysis, or lack thereof. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, has asked the inspector general to investigate political meddling in the office.

After months of promises we now see that the analytical support for a $1.5 trillion, nearly 500-page piece of legislation is a 400-word note that boils down to “trust us.” No wonder the letter isn’t signed. What career analysts would put their names to these worthless claims?