published May 10, 2018 2:15:35 PM, by Erik Wasson
(Bloomberg) —

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that if Democrats take control of the House in November and she’s elected as their leader, she will seek to revise the GOP’s tax cut bill to reverse its estimated $1.9 trillion increase to federal budget deficits.

“The tax bill is a dark cloud over our children’s future,” the California Democrat said Thursday at the Peterson Foundation Fiscal Summit in Washington. “We want to revisit in a way that puts the middle class first and reduces the debt.”
Pelosi said she would seek to negotiate a bipartisan extension of the tax bill’s middle-class tax cuts for individuals, which expire in 2026. The new tax bill would be one that “promotes growth, generates jobs and reduces the deficit,” she said.

Republicans have been highlighting the tax cuts signed by President Donald Trump in December as polls show Democrats have a chance of taking the House and perhaps the Senate in November’s elections. But the issue may be of limited value to the GOP. An April NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed that 27 percent of Americans said the cuts were a good idea, a decline from 30 percent in January.

Pelosi didn’t say whether she would seek to raise the corporate rate — which was cut to 21 percent from 35 percent — and didn’t specify other tax breaks she would seek to end. The GOP tax law gave an array of temporary tax breaks to other types of businesses and to individuals — including rate cuts that will tend to favor the highest earners.

Pelosi promised to follow pay-as-you-go procedures for any new spending, though she didn’t specify how she would fund the infrastructure and education proposals in the Democrats’ election-year platform.

“Wouldn’t it have been better if we had spent over a trillion dollars on infrastructure” instead of “tax breaks for the wealthy?” she said.

The U.S. budget deficit is projected to rise above $1 trillion per year in 2020 and remain at that level, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

To contact the reporter on this story: Erik Wasson in Washington at ewasson@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net Justin Blum, Laurie Asséo

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