Via Bloomie:
President-elect Donald Trump’s race to enact the biggest tax cuts since the 1980s went under a caution flag Monday as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned he considers current levels of U.S. debt “dangerous” and said he wants any tax overhaul to avoid adding to the deficit.
“I think this level of national debt is dangerous and unacceptable,” McConnell said, adding he hopes Congress doesn’t lose sight of that when it acts next year. “My preference on tax reform is that it be revenue neutral,” he said.
During a news conference, McConnell also poured cold water on the idea of a massive stimulus package, effectively laying out markers on taxes and spending that that could cramp Trump’s ambitions.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan think tank, has projected that Trump’s plans would increase the debt by $5.3 trillion over a decade, with deficits already over $600 billion a year and rising on autopilot.
…“What I hope we will clearly avoid, and I’m confident we will, is a trillion-dollar stimulus,” he said. “Take you back to 2009. We borrowed $1 trillion and nobody could find that it did much of anything. So we need to do this carefully and correctly and the issue of how to pay for it needs to be dealt with responsibly.”
McConnell is clearly leading some kind of revolt, from this morning, via the FT:
The US Senate’s top Republican has backed an investigation into allegations that the Kremlin engaged in a hacking campaign to influence November’s presidential elections in the most serious break yet between the president-elect Donald Trump and his party’s traditional leaders in Washington.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said that Congress would probe the allegations following the disclosure of a Central Intelligence Agency report which concluded that Russia had hacked into Democratic National Committee servers in an effort to sway the election outcome in Mr Trump’s favour.
The president-elect, who has repeatedly dismissed claims of Russian interference and belittled the CIA after its conclusions became public, took to Twitter on Monday to insist it was “hard to determine who was doing the hacking”.
“Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card,” Mr Trump wrote. “It would be called conspiracy theory!”
Until now, many Republican leaders on Capitol Hill who openly broke with Mr Trump during the presidential campaign have fallen into line behind their newly elected standard-bearer. After the initial CIA disclosure on Friday, Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham joined Democratic colleagues to call for a bipartisan inquiry, but both have long been seen as party mavericks.
Nobody is spooked by this suggesting that, for the time being at least, it is more positioning than it is genuine disruption.
