Editorial: A bill Congress can't dodge

THE ISSUE:

A reckless tax bill only adds to the nation's fiscal problems.

THE STAKES:

Will Americans be lulled by some modest cuts or see the big picture the president and his allies gloss over?

A trillion dollars is a number so large one struggles to comprehend it. Consider this: At the current median household income in this country, about $59,000 a year, an American family could live on a trillion dollars for nearly 17 million years. That's longer than all of human evolution.

Donald Trump and congressional Republicans will blow through that much money — and possibly much more — in just 10 years in order to give rich people and big corporations tax cuts built on failed trickle-down economic theory.

That $1 trillion will be added to another $10 trillion in new debt that the government already is projected to amass in the next decade under current law.

And $1 trillion might be a huge underestimate. The fiscally conservative Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that with all the gimmicks in the tax bill, the real cost could exceed $2 trillion, not counting any economic growth as a result of the tax cuts.

So it's an understatement to say there will be a big price to pay for this giveaway.

Mr. Trump signed the bill Friday, calling it a Christmas gift to the middle class. But any consumer knows what you put on a credit card eventually comes due, often with interest. In the government's case, that interest already consumes more than $300 billion a year, a number that's only going to grow thanks to this tax bill.

That's not, of course, the message that Mr. Trump and Republicans want to push going into the 2018 mid-term elections. Their cynical, political, fiscally irresponsible plan is to keep spinning this as nothing more than a great big tax cut.

That facade, however, is already crumbling as unpaid bills come due and new ones mount. Congress just passed a temporary budget extender to keep the government running into January, but failed to deal with an $81 billion disaster relief bill needed to help victims of hurricanes and wildfires. Or the $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan Mr. Trump has been hyping. Or his absurd border wall of undetermined cost. Or the $40 billion Mr. Trump wants to add to what's already the world's costliest military, or the $80 billion Republicans suggest, even as they scrounge for $3 billion to keep the Children's Health Insurance Program, which protects 9 million kids, running for just three more months.

Something has got to give — as Republicans themselves warned for years, until they claimed full control of the executive and legislative branches. House Speaker Paul Ryan has already said that his next big targets are the country's great social programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell quickly sought to tamp down talk of that happening "next year."

Mr. Trump and Republican leaders may think Americans can't see through such parsing and gimmickry and will just be happy with a small tax break, rather than weighing numbers in the trillions. But polls show most voters oppose this scheme, well aware that a few hundred dollars now, or even a couple thousand, will come at a far too high cost to them, their descendants and their country.