Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent. (Photo from Progect Syndicate.)
By setting an ambitious 3% growth target, U.S. Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent has provided the Trump administration a North Star to follow in devising its economic policies. The task now is to focus on productivity growth and avoiding any unforced errors that would threaten output.
U.S. Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent is right to emphasize faster economic growth as a touchstone of Donald Trump’s second presidency. More robust growth not only implies higher incomes and living standards—surely the basic objective of economic policy—but also can reduce America’s yawning federal budget deficit and debt-to-GDP ratio, and ease the sometimes difficult trade-offs across defense, social, and education and research spending.
But faster growth must be more than just a wish. Achieving it calls for a carefully constructed agenda, based on a recognition of the channels through which economic policies can raise or reduce output. While a pro-investment tax policy might boost capital accumulation, productivity, and GDP, higher interest rates from deficit-financed tax or spending changes might have the opposite effect. Similarly, since growth in hours worked is a component of growth in output or GDP, the new administration should avoid anti-work policies that hinder full labor-force participation, as well as sudden adverse changes to legal immigration.
While recognizing that some policy shifts that increase output might adversely affect other areas of social interest (such as the distribution of income) or even national security, policymakers should focus squarely on increasing productivity. The three pillars of any productivity policy are support for research, investment-friendly tax provisions, and more efficient regulation.
Ideas drive prospects in modern economies. Basic research in the sciences, engineering, and medicine power the innovation that advances technology, improvements in business organization, and gains in health and well-being. It makes perfect sense for the federal government to support such research. Since private firms cannot appropriate all the gains from their own outlays for basic research, they have less of an incentive to invest in it. Moreover, government support in this area produces valuable spillovers, as demonstrated by the earlier Defense Department research expenditures that became catalysts for today’s digital revolution.
This being the case, cuts in federal support for basic research are inconsistent with a growth agenda. Still, policymakers should review how research funds are distributed to ensure scientific merit, and they should encourage a healthy dose of risk-taking on newer ideas and researchers.
In addition to encouraging commercialization of spillovers from basic research and defense programs, federal support for applied research centers around the country would accelerate the dissemination of new productivity-enhancing technologies and ideas. Such centers also tend to distribute the economy’s prosperity more widely, by making new ideas broadly accessible—as agricultural- and manufacturing-extension services have done historically.
To address the second pillar of productivity growth, the administration should seek to extend the pro-investment provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that Trump signed into law in 2017. While the TCJA’s lower tax rates on corporate profits remain in place, the expensing of business investment – a potent tool for boosting capital accumulation, productivity, and incomes – was set to be phased out over the 2023-26 period. This provision could be restored and made permanent by reducing spending on credits under the Inflation Reduction Act, or by rolling back the spending – such as $175 billion to forgive student loans – associated with outgoing President Joe Biden’s executive orders.
If the new administration wanted to go further with tax policy, it could build on the 2016 House Republican blueprint for tax reform that shifted the business tax regime from an income tax to a cashflow tax. By permitting immediate expensing of investment, but not interest deductions for nonfinancial firms, this reform would stimulate investment and growth, remove tax incentives that favor debt over equity, and simplify the tax system.
That brings us to the third pillar of a successful growth strategy: efficient regulation. The issue is not “more” versus “less.” What really matters for growth is how changes in regulation can improve the prospects for growth through innovation, investment, and capital allocation, while focusing on trade-offs in risks. Those shaping the agenda should start with basic questions like: Why can’t we build better infrastructure faster? Why can’t capital markets and bank lending be nimbler? Not only do such questions identify a specific goal; they also require one to identify trade-offs.
Fortunately, financial regulation under the new administration is likely to improve capital allocation and the prospects for growth, given the leadership appointments already announced at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve. But policymakers also will need to improve the climate for building infrastructure and enhancing the country’s electricity grids to support the data centers needed for generative artificial intelligence. This will require a sharper focus on cost-benefit analysis at the federal level, as well as better coordination with state and local authorities on permitting. Using federal financial support programs as carrots or sticks can be part of such a strategy.
Bessent’s emphasis on economic growth is spot on. By setting an ambitious 3% target for annual growth, he has provided the new administration a North Star to follow in devising its economic policies.
This commentary first appeared on Project Syndicate.
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