Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Pressed On GOP's Proposed Budget Adding Trillions To National Debt

On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spoke to CNN's Jake Tapper about President Trump's tariff policies.

Transcript

00:00Well, Jake, first of all, the history of rating agencies, by the time they get to a downgrade,

00:05everything's already in the market. Larry Summers and I don't agree on everything,

00:09but in 2011, the last time or two times ago when he had a downgrade, he poo-pooed it.

00:17What I think is important is that President Trump has just come back from this historic

00:23Mideast trip, and there's trillions of dollars coming into the U.S., so we are seeing confidence

00:29from investors, so I don't put much credence in the Moody's. The downgrade comes as Republicans

00:35are trying to pass the big, beautiful bill, as the president calls it. It's a massive bill that has

00:41tax cuts, spending cuts. The nonpartisan committee for a responsible federal budget says that this

00:47bill, if it passes in its current form, will add between $3.3 and $5.2 trillion to the national

00:54debt over the next decade. Now, the debt is a concern of yours. You talked about our debt

00:59being on an unsustainable path earlier this month. Won't this bill just make it worse?

01:05There are several components there, and so if we unpack it, there is the growth, the potential

01:12growth of the debt, but what's more important is that we grow the economy faster, so what we

01:17what we've seen under the past four years, and what we inherited, I inherited 6.7% deficit

01:25to GDP, which was the highest deficit when we were not at war, not in a recession, so we've

01:31been trying to bring down the spending, and we are going to grow the revenue side, so we

01:37are going to grow the GDP faster than the debt grows, and that will stabilize the debt to GDP,

01:44which even Secretary Yellen and I agree is the most important number.

01:49So when in the first Trump administration, you were not a part of it, but obviously President

01:53Trump was, there were tax cuts passed, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget

01:58says that those tax cuts added $2.5 trillion to the national debt and did not, I mean, there's

02:04always a hope that it will bring about so much revenue growth that it will pay for itself,

02:07but that didn't happen. Well, we also had something called COVID, and so there was a rescue plan.

02:15This is separate from that, though. I'm aware of the COVID trillions.

02:18Yeah, but the CBO scoring was about a trillion and a half off, and again, what matters is the

02:27growth, and during President Trump's first term, up until March of 2020, we had very high

02:34non-inflationary growth, and that's what I think we can have again this time.