From reputable studies, that is. CEA concludes in its report on the OBBB:
$1.3 to $3.7 trillion in additional offsetting deficit reduction from higher growth unleashed by enhanced deregulation and energy policies
Here’s the impact over ten years of deregulatory efforts/energy initiatives which somehow CEA relates to the OBBB.
Note the cumulative impact is $2.251 trillion deficit reduction (this is relative to current law baseline, not current policy baseline, shown in CEA (2025) figure 2).
Now, where do these deregulatory benefits come from? Here’s the related CEA document on the benefits of deregulation.
To get a better sense of the potential long-run benefits of deregulation, it is instructive to look at rulemaking under the previous administration. Based on estimates from Federal agencies themselves as reported by the American Action Forum, the Biden Administration imposed a record $1.8 trillion in present value in new regulatory costs on the economy. If the potential cost savings from rolling back these rules is annualized over a 20-year period, it is equivalent to a 0.29 percentage point increase in annual economic growth, assuming that every dollar of regulatory cost reduces gross domestic product (GDP) by a dollar and that these regulations have no market benefits.5
However, even those effects come in far below University of Chicago Professor Casey Mulligan’s estimate of $5 trillion in present value regulatory costs in Biden Administration rulemaking, when properly accounting for resource and opportunity costs that, in his assessment, were not captured in the official estimates.6 If Professor Mulligan’s estimate is used, the potential long-run cost savings from rolling back these rules increase to 0.78 percentage points annually.
The $5 trillion estimate comes from a Committee to Unleash Prosperity document, written by Casey Mulligan. (The Committee to Unleash Prosperity was cofounded by Arthur Laffer and Steve Moore; those two are associated with ALEC’s publication, Rich States, Poor States. As discussed here, there is no empirical content to their economic outlook index).
Casey Mulligan earlier declared no recession (10 months after its start), as recounted in this post.
Barring a nuclear war or other violent national disaster, employment will not drop below 134,000,000 and real GDP will not drop below $11 trillion. The many economists who predict a severe recession clearly disagree with me, because 134 million is only 2.4% below September’s employment and only 2.0% below employment during the housing crash. Time will tell.
He later asserted that his incorrect prediction was due to his failure to understand that unemployment benefits would be so generous(!):
As of October 2008, I had not anticipated that the public policy response would be to pay the unemployed so generously, to the point that millions could make more unemployed than employed. Whatever ultimately depressed the labor market, it was apparently unanticipated by the chief White House Economic advisers, despite the fact that they had at least 3 months more data than I did.]
Other “Mulligans” here: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Wow. Incredibly creative accounting. Note the magical dynamic growth effect of $1.9 trillion due to the tax cuts for billionaires. But somehow they neglect to include any magical dynamic GDP reductions due to the tariff tax increases on everyone else. A tax decrease and a tax increase are self cancelling. And that growth assumption also presumes no retaliatory tariffs that reduce GDP exports.
Hey, how about a Laffer (or laughter) curve for tariff revenues. Presumably the higher you make tariffs, the less people buy imports and the less revenue you get. And Trump claims the stated goal, national security, is to incentivize companies moving operations back to the US, which further reduces import tariffs. You can’t simultaneously claim to increase revenues by tariffs on imports and reduce the trade deficit by reducing imports.
And then there is the imaginary growth from regulatory and energy reforms that are not even part of the bill. And additional undisclosed discretionary spending cuts. Trust them, you can count on these further reductions even though no one has specified them — they pinky swear. If they really believed in further discretionary spending cuts, they would put them in the current bill where people can really see them. Even if one were to believe them, these speculative regulatory changes and discretionary cuts have nothing to do with the current bill and therefore lend no support at all justifying its enactment.
And now we have the corrupt wheeling and dealing to push the MAGAMurder bill across the finish line.
They have rewritten a portion of the bill to provide exemptions for the odious SNAP and Medicaid cuts to “non-contiguous states”. This phrase appears 11 times in the new rewrite. This means Alaska and Hawaii without have to embarrassingly say “just Alaska and Hawaii,” as a bribe to get Lisa Murkowski’s vote. Murkowski is gloating saying “I got mine, F-you” as she approves screwing everyone else.
The reason for phrasing it as “non-contiguous states” which includes Hawaii, is to get around parliamentarian objections to single state carve outs.
I can remember the days when pundits lauded Murkowski as one of the “moderate Republicans.” Nope, she’s just as crappy a Trump sycophant as all the other MAGA Republicans willingly going along with the MAGAMurder bill.
Murkowski has been hinting at defecting, caucusing with Democrats. It’s a quasi-credible threat because of her one-time primary loss to a crazy-right Republican. She won her seat as an independent. Threatening her with Trump-ire ain’t gonna work, because she has beaten her own party before. Gotta go carrot when sticks don’t work.
Josh Hawley must be in awe.
I dont think mulligan is even relevant anymore.
Now they have more crooked accounting. Under reconciliation rules that bypass the filibuster, you can’t create deficits that extend beyond 10 years. That’s why the Trump TCJA tax cuts from 2017 are set to expire.
But the new MAGAMurder bill fails that rule. They can’t come up with enough spending cuts to offset the tax cuts without breaking the deficit rules.
So what to do? Well, just make up new accounting rules that ignore the cost of the tax cuts. This is the difference in accounting between the so-called “current law” and “current policy”. Under current law, the 2017 tax cuts expire so you have to account for the cost of extending them. This has been the accepted accounting rule for decades.
But the Republicans new “current policy” accounting assumes that the current tax cuts set to expire shouldn’t cost anything to extend because they are already current policy. So under the new accounting, the bill has no tax cuts costs and actually on net reduces deficits because of its SNAP and Medicaid cuts. This claim ignores the fact that what they are claiming as “current policy” only became the current policy because it was set to expire after 10 years to abide by the reconciliation rules in 2017.
Yep, so using their new accounting rules they claim they are actually reducing the national debt by cutting taxes. The net result is negative $500 billion.
And they also say the heck with the parliamentarian. Lindsey Graham claims the he alone as chairman of the senate budget committee can decide the accounting methods.
So once again Republicans have a simple solution for unpleasant math. If you don’t get the result you want, just change the math. Goes back to Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts.” The truth becomes whatever you want it to be.
Professor Mulligan will always be relevant, just like Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, because their lies serve the interests of the rich. Mulligan is especially pernicious since he always blames recessions on “lazy workers taking vacations” on unemployment insurance.
Macroduck: “Murkowski has been hinting at defecting, caucusing with Democrats.”
Ha, ha. No! Whatever made you think that?
Today Murkowski was the single vote to push the MAGAMurder bill over the line. Even after realizing and stating that it would be devastating to her own Alaska constituents with the special Alaska carve out removed, she had to fall in line in loyalty to her Dear Leader.
Reporter: Why did you vote for the bill?
Murkowski: Kill it and it’s gone. There is a tax impact coming forward. That’s gonna hurt people in my state.
So Murkowski who pretended to be worried about low income people losing their Medicare and Medicaid before her Alaska carve out was removed, when it came down to it, she threw them under the bus in favor of the millionaires, of which there are 22,000 in Alaska.
There are no “moderate Republicans”. Stop pretending that they exist.