Donald Trump Is Promising To Give Voters Free Stuff

Donald Trump is vowing to enact policies if he is elected president in November that would benefit voters’ pocketbooks, while offering few details as to how he plans to pay for them — a series of campaign promises that fly in the face of longstanding Republican Party orthodoxy about fiscal prudence and small government.

Last week, Trump announced that the government would pay for the costs of fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization, which can run to tens of thousands of dollars per cycle, if he becomes president again. He has also proposed eliminating taxes on workers’ tips and on Social Security benefits, which nonpartisan scorekeepers say would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit. His campaign has not said how he intends to pay for these ideas.

Coupled with his plans to extend key parts of his 2017 tax cut bill and cut corporate taxes even more, Trump’s policy blueprint would add nearly $6 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, according to a Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis.

Trump’s plans amount to handing out what now-Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who lost to former President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential race, once decried as “gifts.” Trump’s rhetoric shows how he has transformed the party from one which at least touted fiscal responsibility — even if the national debt actually skyrocketed under the last two GOP administrations — to one in which the presidential nominee is free to do whatever it takes to win.

Trump making lofty campaign promises is nothing new. During his 2016 run, he pledged to build hundreds of miles of wall on the southern U.S. border if elected, and to make Mexico pay for it. Mexico did not pay; the U.S. government picked up the tab for the sections of border barrier