I’m no fan of former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers for a whole host of reasons, but I agree with a lot of his criticism about this so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” Republicans just passed and the kind of damage it’s going to do. Republicans are out there trying to do damage control as we saw from the likes of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett over the weekend, who were both lying about who this law is going to harm and the fact that it’s going to explode the deficit.
Summers, who made an appearance on this Sunday’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, didn’t mince words when it came to how many people they’re going to kill.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Want to get more on this now from former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Also the former president of Harvard University.
Larry, thank you for joining us this morning.
In “The New York Times” this week, you and Robert Rubin, who also served as president — as Treasury secretary, called this bill dangerous, said it “posed a huge risk to the economy.”
What are those risks?
FORMER TREASURY SECRETARY LARRY SUMMERS: George, just to start with, what your people have been describing is the biggest cut in the American safety net in history. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that it will kill, over 10 years, 100,000 people. That is 2,000 days of death like we’ve seen in Texas this weekend. In my 70 years, I’ve never been as embarrassed for my country on July 4th.
These higher interest rates, these cutbacks in subsidies to electricity, these reductions in the availability of housing, the fact that hospitals are going to have to take care of these people and pass on the costs to everybody else, and that’s going to mean more inflation, more risk that the Fed has to raise interest rates and run the risk of recession, more stagflation, that’s the risk facing every middle-class family in our country because of this bill.
And for what? A million dollars over 10 years to the top tenth of a percent of our population. Is that the highest priority use of federal money right now? I don’t think so. This is a shameful act by our Congress and by our president that is going to set our country back.
Stephanopoulos asked Summers about their magical accounting numbers they always use, pretending economic growth will pay for their tax cuts, and Summers promptly shot that down.
SUMMERS: It is respectfully nonsense. None of us can forecast what’s going to happen to economic growth. What we can forecast is that when people have to hold government debt instead of being able to invest it in new capital goods, new machinery, new buildings, that makes the economy less productive.
What we can forecast is that when we’re investing less in research and development, investing less in our schools, that there is a negative impact on economic growth. There is no economist anywhere, without a strong political agenda, who is saying that this bill is a positive for the economy. And the overwhelming view is that it is probably going to make the economy worse.
Think about it this way. How long can the world’s greatest debtor remain the world’s greatest power? And this is piling more debt onto the economy than any piece of tax legislation in dollar terms that we have ever had.
After Stephanopoulos questioned Summers on the fact that the US economy has remained pretty resilient despite warnings about our deficit, Summers again went after the bill for the risk involved and who it harms:
SUMMERS: George, the best period we have had in the economy was the economy that — was the period that Secretary Rubin and I wrote about when we served President Clinton and by acting responsibly on the deficit by listening to the CBO rather than expressing contempt for it, we reduced the deficit, set off a virtual — virtues circle of increased investment, more growth, lower deficits, lower interest rates, and then around the cycle again.
Experts warn about risks. And I can’t tell you whether the financial crisis is going to come this year or whether the financial crisis is going to come five years from now. And I’m not going to do cry wolf rhetoric. By the way, I was the one who was saying for a decade after 2010 that deficit reduction didn’t need to be a national priority.
But anybody who looks at the numbers sees that we’ve never had deficits remotely like this or the prospect of debts remotely like this at a moment when the economy was strong and we were at peace anytime in our history. This is a risk that we don’t need to run, and for what? To give $1 million a year to the top-tenth of a percent while, in effect, sentencing 100,000 poor Americans to death over the next 10 years because they can’t get access to necessary medical procedures, because they can’t get driven to a hospital, because their family members can’t get supported? This is just wrong.
Trump doesn’t care who he kills or harms as long as he and his rich buddies have theirs. It’s some strange times we’re living in when I actually agree with a lot of what’s coming out of Larry Summers’ mouth.