Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks - Wikimedia Commons
Kavin Hassett - White House
Kevin Hassett participates in a roundtable in the State Dining Room of the White House Wednesday, April 29, 2020.
President Donald Trump has staked much of the credibility of his "big, beautiful bill" of tax cuts on Kevin Hassett, a right-wing economist long hitched to Trump's movement who insists in the face of all evidence that hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid cuts aren't actually Medicaid cuts, wrote Jonathan Chait in a searing analysis for The Atlantic published on Monday evening.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has forecast that Trump's new law will cost millions of people their health care while driving up energy prices and adding more than $2 trillion to the deficit—but Hassett has a simple answer when confronted with this.
"If the Trump administration’s estimate is based on an alternative model, Hassett did not share it. Instead, his argument was a purely negative one," wrote Chait. "The CBO, he explained, cannot be trusted, because it has been wrong in the past—specifically, during the debate over legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) during the first Trump administration. 'Go back to 2017, when we had work requirements for Obamacare: They said that we’d lose about 4 million insured between 2017 and 2019, and about double that over the next 10 years,' he said. 'And in fact, the number of insured went up.'"
In fact, Chait noted, the bill to establish "work requirements for Obamacare" never passed—and while Trump allowed some states to experiment with work requirements, they were a colossal failure.
Supply Side Bull
But this is just the tip of the iceberg for Hassett's "unfortunate" history of errors, he continued.
"Hassett comes from the 'supply-side economics' wing of the Republican Party, a school of pseudo-economic thought once famously derided by George H. W. Bush as 'voodoo economics' for its unlikely claims that cutting taxes can yield higher government revenue. In 1999, Hassett co-authored Dow 36,000, which asserted that the stock market was wildly undervalued and was poised to more than quadruple in a few years. In fact, it would be more than two decades before the Dow Jones hit 36,000." He later served on Trump's Council of Economic Advisers, where he confidently designed a model that predicted COVID deaths "would peak in April and trail off to almost zero by mid-May"—when instead the virus killed 1.1 million people from 2020-2023.
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"It is perhaps because of, rather than despite, these absurd predictions that Hassett has found his way into an even more influential role in Trump’s second term," wrote Chait. "Now here he is arguing that people should refuse to take the Congressional Budget Office seriously, because the Congressional Budget Office has made some embarrassing predictions in the past. Instead, we should believe that the CBO’s projection of 8 million people losing Medicaid is 8 million too high."
"Can we at least see the model that arrived at this amazing conclusion? No, we can’t," he concluded. "But we should trust the proven track record of Kevin Hassett."
