Ray Dalio, a billionaire investor who repeatedly has warned about America’s unsustainable debt trajectory, will brief House Republicans on Tuesday morning, at the invitation of Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas).
His appearance comes as Republicans struggle with how to account for the cost of their tax cut plans, with some pushing for an accounting strategy that would zero-out the price tag and others warning that would amount to fiscal fraud.
Just in recent weeks, Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, has said that America’s debt situation could cause an “economic heart attack” and “shocking developments.”
“It is imperative that members of Congress engage with thought leaders like Mr. Dalio, who have extensive, real-world experience that can help guide us as we work to restore fiscal sanity in Washington before it’s too late,” Arrington said ahead of the briefing.
Dalio’s appearance, planned for after the House GOP conference meeting, comes as congressional Republicans are still hashing out some of the big-picture questions on a huge budget package this year, including how much a potential plan might add to deficits.
One particularly large outstanding question is whether Republicans should use a current policy baseline, which would assert that there is no cost to extending the temporary parts of the 2017 Trump tax cuts that are set to expire at the end of this year.
It’s not clear whether the Senate parliamentarian will allow such an approach in a budget reconciliation measure, which is how Republicans plan to pass their agenda. But it would give the GOP more headroom than the traditional current law baseline, which would hold that keeping the expiring provisions would cost $4 trillion or more over a decade.
The budget resolution that passed the House last month uses the current law approach.
Some House deficit hawks haven’t held back in knocking the current policy baseline — and just within recent days, a CBO analysis requested by Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) found that the federal debt would soar if the tax provisions were extended without being offset.
