Choosing the simpler path is a familiar move for Trump, and so is picking a policy that places deficit reduction far behind his other priorities. While the president has at times talked about tackling—and even pledged to eliminate—the nation’s nearly $20 trillion debt, he has campaigned and governed as a bigger-government conservative. He’s called for up to $1 trillion in new infrastructure spending, proposed a $30 billion increase in the military budget, and wants to build a wall along the southern border that could cost billions more. Trump’s initial budget proposal called for steep cuts to domestic programs to pay for some of the increased spending elsewhere, but it notably omitted any effort at restraining the entitlement programs eyed by Republicans as the main drivers of long-term deficits. When Trump called himself “the king of debt” in a CBS interview last year, he was referring to how he used strategic borrowing in the operation of his businesses. But he’s resorting to a similar approach to run the government as well.

“The Trump campaign proposed two revenue-decreasing tax plans during the campaign. It should not be so surprising if they also propose a net tax cut once in the White House,” said Scott Greenberg, an analyst with the Tax Foundation, which projected that the Trump campaign’s final tax plan would have increased deficits by as much as $5.9 trillion.

The president’s outline is likely to win some fans among Republicans in Congress, but it will cause conflict with others. In the House, GOP leaders have been writing a tax bill that would not add to the deficit under the formula the party uses to estimate its impact on the budget (calculations that Democrats vigorously dispute). That’s a major reason why Ryan has been pushing for a “border adjustment tax” designed to offset an estimated $1 trillion in rate reductions over a decade.

But with that plan facing bipartisan opposition and with the GOP health-care bill stalled, conservative economists have been pushing the party to advance a tax proposal that would be politically easier and, in their view, more quickly stimulate economic growth. They’re advancing the theory popularized under former President Ronald Reagan that lower taxes will generate more economic activity and thereby lead to more revenue for the government from a broader base of taxpayers. Adopting that view, the White House has decided to go big on rate cuts. According to The Wall Street Journal, the proposal will call for a 15 percent tax rate both for corporations—down from 35 percent—and for smaller businesses in which the owners currently pay the highest individual rate of 39.6 percent. “The tax plan will pay for itself with economic growth,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters on Monday.

Yet even the most ardent supply-side advocates don’t believe a cut that deep will refill the government’s coffers through economic growth alone. Their argument is that the deficit concerns are less important than the need to jolt the economy, which has been growing at a modest rate of around 2 percent or less for the last several years. “I’m not saying that cutting the corporate rate from 35 [percent] to 15 [percent] is going to pay for itself,” Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who advised Trump during the campaign, told me on Tuesday. “It may. It may not. I’m just saying that if we can get more growth from it, do it. And if that means you’re going to have a higher deficit, so what? It’s worth it to get more growth.”