The confirmation hearing for Donald Trump’s nominee to be secretary of the treasury, Scott Bessent, was relatively calm compared to the combative questioning other nominees faced this week. But senators did come ready to fight about one thing: this year’s tax debate.
Bessent seemed happy for the tax negotiations to take center stage. Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from 2017 is set to expire this year, and Bessent wants them to become permanent, calling it the “single most important economic issue of the day.”
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts could add $4.6 trillion to the national deficit over the next decade. But Bessent repeated a refrain in defense of the cuts during the hearing: “We do not have a revenue problem in the United States of America, we have a spending problem.”