Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “This Week,” that the “Big, Beautiful” bill could ill as many as 100,000 Americans over the next ten years. “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.”

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: Part of the president’s argument is that economic growth sparked by the bill will alleviate the dangers that you talk about here. The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers is up next, and his council issued a report this week projecting $ 11 trillion in deficit reduction from growth, higher tax revenue and savings on debt payments. How do you respond to that? 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. STEPHANOPOULOS: But, Larry, as you know, experts in the past have raised alarm bells about the deficits, and the economy seems pretty resilient in the face of that. 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. Look, there are lots of things, George, that you argue about, and Democrats, Republicans have different perspectives. This is that very rare instance where everybody outside of a mainstream sees something very dangerous happen. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, the president’s team argued that tariff revenue is going to help make up some of the shortfall. What’s your response? SUMMERS: Yeah, it probably will collect some revenue at the cost of higher inflation for American consumers, less competitiveness for American producers. 60 times as many people use — work in industries that use steel as work in the steel industry, and every one of them is less competitive because of the president’s tariffs. So, higher prices, less competitiveness, and not really that much revenue relative to what’s being given to the very wealthy in this bill.

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