Did you hear the one about the Presidential budget team who couldn’t do arithmetic? Not if you read the Republican blogs.
While Donald Trump mutters around the Old World, his budget team has issued the meat to the trembling budget skeleton they rolled out two months ago. This “New Foundation for American Greatness” is based on counting $2 trillion twice:
Trump has promised to enact “the biggest tax cut in history.” Trump’s administration has insisted, however, that the largest tax cut in history will not reduce revenue, because it will unleash growth. That is itself a wildly fanciful assumption. But that assumption has already become a baseline of the administration’s budget math. Trump’s budget assumes the historically yuge tax cuts will not lose any revenue for this reason — the added growth it will supposedly generate will make up for all the lost revenue.
But then the budget assumes $2 trillion in higher revenue from growth in order to achieve balance after ten years. So the $2 trillion from higher growth is a double-count. It pays for the Trump cuts, and then it pays again for balancing the budget. Or, alternatively, Trump could be assuming that his tax cuts will not only pay for themselves but generate $2 trillion in higher revenue. But Trump has not claimed his tax cuts will recoup more than 100 percent of their lost revenue, so it’s simply an embarrassing mistake [Jonathan Chait, “Trump Budget Based on $2 Trillion Math Error,” New York Magazine, 2017.05.23].
The Trump budget is beyond embarrassing. It is further proof that Trump has failed to live up to his promise to “surround myself only with the best and most serious people” who could make up for his (ahem) inexperience:
The growth accounting mess shows a parallel value — or, rather, lack of value — placed on the idea of governing with integrity. The Obama administration did not expect congressional Republicans to adopt his budget proposals, and, of course, they didn’t. But they could have done so if they wanted to. By deploying the resources of the executive branch to lay out workable blueprints for possible federal budgets, Obama helped lay the groundwork for hypothetical future Democratic Congresses to enact things his party cared about.
Trump’s White House is just going through the motions. They’re supposed to release a budget proposal, so they released a budget proposal. Whether or not it makes any sense is a matter of total indifference to them. But they’ve now kicked the can to congressional Republicans in an awkward way, since if Congress wants to enact a budget, they need to enact a real one with details filled in. Meaning they can’t possibly match the unrealistic aspirations Trump has laid out for them [Matthew Yglesias, “The Dumb Accounting Error at the Heart of Trump’s Budget,” Vox, 2017.05.23].
We can disregard the Trump budget from a policy perspective: it can’t work. It wasn’t designed to work. Its only value is in demonstrating Team Trump’s cruelty, laziness, and incompetence.
Yeah, nothing can happen to the rest of us when students avoid challenging math courses….
ought plus double ought equals tax cut for NOem, Thune and Rounds. We even see this fuzzy math in Pierre. With Medicaid Expansion, we could be in the black with our figures instead of dark red like the legislature. What used to be puzzling to me is that for a party that claims they understand business and the bottom line, it is a proven fact that they love to operate in the red. You see this in the ag business as well. The idea is for an example, take in 500,000.00 in income and then write off 500,000.00 in expense. In the meantime, you get to claim that you are being conservative while you are a deadbeat. Oh and beat hell out of the folks that are in the nursing homes or on food stamps as being leeches. Life is funny like that.
Proof of the collusion between russia and republicans
“A Republican political operative in Florida asked the alleged Russian hacker who broke into Democratic Party organizations’ servers at the height of the 2016 campaign to pass him stolen documents, according to a report Thursday by the Wall Street Journal.
In return, that operative received valuable Democratic voter-turnout analyses, which the newspaper found at least one GOP campaign consultant took advantage of the information. The hacker went on to flag that same data to Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of Donald Trump’s who briefly advised his presidential campaign, and who is currently under federal investigation for potential collusion with Russia.
The Wall Street Journal’s report presents the clearest allegations to date of collusion between people connected to Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.
From TPM
Maybe NOem, Thune and the other comrade would like to deny the clear russian takeover of America. Want to know what russia gets? Russia gets NATO disbanded by the United States. Russia also gets the dissolution of the European Union. The more Europe fractures, the better for russia. Anyone guess what would happen next? Read history of World Wars and you will see there were two of them. Anyone care to think of what would happen when more than one protagonist is armed with nukes? So what do NOem,Thune and the other comrade get for this? Money and lots of it. Call it tax breaks or call it whatever you want, the bottom line is money.
Using Trump math, we should cut taxes by twice as much as Trump is planning and then we could raise 4 times as much money to pay off our national debt. Better yet, let’s eliminate all taxes which will most assuredly eliminate all our debt. Rich people are going to get tired of winning.
If one believes in the magic growth of tax cuts, this will all work – no math needed to support the GOP mantra that has been chanted long before President Trump took office. However, if one looks to where this magical world of tax cut growth has been put into effect and has destroyed an economy, we need look no further than Kansas where deep tax cuts robbed the state treasury of the ability to continue basic social programs and resulted in none of that magically inspired growth – in fact, deep and drastic cuts had to be made. Kansas cut taxes, and Kansas had less money to work with. Maybe Kansas just didn’t believe hard enough?
In addition to nearly 7,000 troops killed, the 16-year conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost an estimated US$6 trillion due to its prolonged length, rapidly increasing veterans health care and disability costs and interest on war borrowing. On this Memorial Day, we should begin to confront the staggering cost and the challenge of paying for this war. http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/5/26/1666444/-Open-thread-for-night-owls-Iraq-and-Afghanistan-6-trillion-for-longest-U-S-war-remains-unpaid