Literally the largest and stupidest arithmetic mistake in the history of the federal budget.

[DonViejo]

Trump Budget Based on $2 Trillion Math Error

By Jonathan Chait

May 23, 2017
9:31 am

One of the ways Donald Trump’s budget claims to balance the budget over a decade, without cutting defense or retirement spending, is to assume a $2 trillion increase in revenue through economic growth. This is the magic of the still-to-be-designed Trump tax cuts. But wait — if you recall, the magic of the Trump tax cuts is also supposed to pay for the Trump tax cuts. So the $2 trillion is a double-counting error.

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.

It seems difficult to imagine how this administration could figure out how to design and pass a tax cut that could pay for itself when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush failed to come anywhere close to doing so. If there is a group of economic minds with the special genius to accomplish this historically unprecedented feat, it is probably not the fiscal minds who just made a $2 trillion basic arithmetic error.

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/trump-budget-based-on-usd2-trillion-math-error.html

[dalton99a]

1. The world's greatest businessman doesn't care about numbers

[Bernardo de La Paz]

11. He can't read a spreadsheet. He has said he'll use bankruptcy to bail out USA.

During the campaign he said he would pay back the US debt at about 60 cents on the dollar.

That debt is mostly held by Americans, but he thinks it is mostly held by China.

He is clueless about the effect of a default on the USA.

It's all part of his plan to "Make America Great Again".

[n2doc]

2. Trump is thinking -"Well, the Russians always made up the difference before...

Why not now?"

[zipplewrath]

3. Golden Asterisk

I dunno. The infamous golden asterisk of the Reagan era is pretty hard to beat.

[GeorgeGist]

4. Obviously Trump is right ...

after all he invented priming the pump.

[Scurrilous]

5. K&R

[ffr]

6. Sad

Budget Director Mick Mulvaney struggles with arithmetic


You'd think he'd at least dawn his witch doctor's cape and top hat.

[sandensea]

15. I bet his math skills miracuoulsy recover whenever he checks his Caribbean account.

[JHB]

7. It's not a mistake...

...it's the tried and true Republican tactic of cooking up numbers for the headlines, and let the rest dribble out safe in the fact that their base will remember the splashy headline and dismiss the follow-on fact-checking as "liberal media bias".

[keithbvadu2]

8. It's not a 'mistake' if it's made on purpose. More like outright fraud.

[gratuitous]

9. Oh come on, you libruls! Give President Trump a chance

You don't know for sure that this $2 trillion error, which just happens to make all this work out in the administration's favor, was intentional! Because it totally wasn't! And you're not giving him a fair chance! Gah, you're all just fly-specking him because you're jealous!

[IronLionZion]

10. New jobs for people who can follow rainbows to discover where they end

[world wide wally]

12. Let me suggest you try keeping the top 1% tax rate where it is and giving the rest of us

an $800 million payout to stimulate the economy, asshole?
How do you think that would go over with your cronies?

[Achilleaze]

13. republican math is like republican climate science

[sandensea]

14. And with the CBO essentially shut down, bullshitting is a cinch.

Fuzzy math, as Al Gore put it (and of course, he was right).

[ProudProgressiveNow]

16. K&R nt

[calimary]

17. Sounds like another job for Rosy Scenario and her sidekick, the Magic Asterisk!

Those were two citations that reagan's budget director, David Stockman, described in a book he wrote about the Gordian Knot-level CON JOB of "reaganomics" after he left that job. Basically pulled the legs out from under all the fancy "trickle-down economics" soothsayers. The "magic asterisk" was literally an asterisk - that they inserted in their attempts at budget figuring, to make everything add up when it otherwise wouldn't. Just insert the good ol' magic asterisk in the calculations and look! Like magic, the budget works! And rainbow unicorns will come shooting out of reagan's ass at high noon every day all summer long! "Rosy Scenario" worked the same way. "She" was brought in to show how - if reaganomics were allowed to work their wonders, everything would be just cool-cool-cool! And it'd all work out fine! And MORE of those rainbow unicorns would come flying out of reagan's ass at high noon every day - all year round!

NONE of it worked. NONE of it turned out the way they said. Ol' Rosy is back now, I see, with all those great-sounding pie-in-the-sky promises about growth at 3%, 4%, 5%, or even - gasp! - 6%! Yeah. And still MORE of those rainbow unicorns will come flying out of EVERYBODY'S asses at noon every day for the rest of all of our lives!

[Earth Bound Misfit]

18. You short a coupla trill? So I go out on the street...

& make a few moves for you. A trill here, a trill there...

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