Slashdot Mirror
President Trump's Budget Includes a $2 Trillion Math Error (time.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TIME: President Trump's budget includes a simple accounting error that adds up to a $2 trillion oversight. Under the proposed budget released Tuesday, the Trump Administration's proposed tax cuts would boost economic growth enough to pay for $1.3 trillion in spending by 2027. But the tax cuts are also supposed to be revenue-neutral, meaning that trillion dollars is already supposed to pay for the money lost from the tax cuts. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers called the oversight an "elementary double count" and "a logical error of the kind that would justify failing a student in an introductory economics course" in an op-ed in the Washington Post.
Like everything else from this administration, it's a lie. We don't have a functioning democracy any more because we don't have an informed public, sadly.
I don't respond to AC's.
If the Bush/Obama tax cuts were fully repealed, it would restore $4T in tax revenues for a decade that could fix the hole in the budget. Those tax cuts never paid for themselves.
Disagree. This is malicious; intentional. Trump isn't stupid.
this is the president you deserve though
Partially disagree. It's malicious but that doesn't mean Trump isn't stupid too.
Hanlon's Razor applies here. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Gray's Law also applies [1].
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
At some point the buck stops, and incomp etence is no excuse. Do you not think the buck stops with the POTUS? It doesn't matter if it's on purpose or a mistake - trillions of dollars of error should result in some firings.
[1] http://joshuabrauer.com/2007/0...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
... when a democrat is in the white house. Don't act surprised!!!
It must have been nice living in your sheltered little world over the 8 years of Obama.
Yes, far too many criticisms were labeled as racist, even entire movements were labeled as such because a single person or two within might say something unkind.
Enjoy the seeds sowed by such nonsense.
Don't just claim it, prove it. Cite where you criticized an accounting error and were called a racist for it.
For that matter, also show that your cited error in the same linked post was accurate.
You're treating a symptom while the disease rages on. The fish rots from the head. Why not cut off the head?
You're right, math is hard. But way too many people who call themselves conservatives round-off whatever errors they get by claiming the economy will magically, dramatically, improve and wipe out their mistakes. According to TFA:
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, for Trump's tax cuts to pay for themselves, the economy would have to grow at 4.5 percent over the next 10 years. That's two and a half times the growth rate projected by the Congressional Budget Office.
That's always what these idiots do. Release the mythical tax strangle-hold on America's super-rich, and all the cuts to the safety net and spending for the military will magically be paid off, because the newly freed super-rich will invest their wealth and the whole country will soar like a pig full of hot air.
Conservatives who don't think very hard fall for this sucker-play because, to them, it's never been done, and it's waiting to happen, just begging to happen, and when it happens, it'll just totally work, and it'll be so great. Of course, nobody's holding a gun to the heads of rich people to do right with their tax relief and create jobs jobs jobs in America... they could spend it all overseas (a little more bang for the buck, there), spend it on yachts, spend it on cocaine... there's a lot of ways money can get spent... or not spent at all. Sunny-days, trickle-down budgets work just as well as Daddy's plan to move you into a nice house as soon as he wins his money back at the racetrack.
It's not a math error. It's a scam.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
One mistake is a million times larger than the other. A little beyond tomato-tomahto differences.
Seriously? You are accusing the left of petty insults, when you idiots have Donald Trump, who was fucking EMBRACED by the right because of his petty insults towards his opponents?
Yeah, but Trump is both malicious and stupid.
No, when "republicans/conservatives/righties" get caught cheating on their wives, get outed as gay, or it comes out they are drug addicts they look like hypocritical douche bags.
When "democrats/liberals/lefties" get caught being racist, sexist, homophobic, name callers they look like hypocritical douche bags.
Anytime anyone gets caught blatantly behaving in the opposite manner that they profess to be their "core values", they look like a lying ass. It doesn't matter if they are left, right or center.
Doesn't matter, Trump doesn't write the proposed budget personally. Hopefully he at least reviews the budget, but he's certainly not sitting there with a calculator and green eyeshades.
Not to mention that Laffer himself repeatedly stated that exploiting the curve to grow revenue is ONLY possible if it's coupled with austerity measures. You can't just cut taxes, you HAVE to cut spending enough to offset it until the growth comes.
The idea is that, at around 60% you could grow revenues over-all by instituting a combination of spending cuts and tax cuts. No republican ever does the spending cuts part - because it's impossible to do the cuts Laffer describes without HUGELY cutting the military budget. Even if you flat out remove EVERYTHING ELSE from the budget it wouldn't be enough without also cutting defense.
Then comes the other factors - generally spending cuts INCREASE deficits and debts because they cost more revenue than they save in expenses (austerity in general is about as sensible as trying to save money on your heating bill by burning your paycheck for warmth). The only time austerity measures can safely be introduced is EXACTLY the opposite of when conservatives tend to push them: during boom times. Cutting spending in a recession is a great way to make the recession worse and the government poorer. You cut spending, if it needs cutting, during boom times when there is enough revenue that you can afford to carry the losses it cause.
So to successfully use the Laffer curve three conditions MUST hold:
1) Marginal tax rates needs to be at the peak of the curve, that's around 60% usually.
2) Spending cuts must match every tax cut
3) It must be during an already-in-progress boom cycle when there's lots of economic growth already happening and you can afford to take a medium term, but severe, shock to the system.
Even then you're likely to trigger a short to medium term recession - you may come out ahead at the end, but make no mistake - getting there is going to be painful. To get the promised holy land you will need to walk barefoot through a field of broken glass.
Republicans however, they don't much care for these facts. They just like to pretend that Laffer said "Tax cuts lead to economic growth which raises revenue" and ignore everything else he said and everything every other economist said so they can keep doing the exact same set of policies they always do - even though they NEVER work, and in fact, consistently produce exactly the outcomes that economists predict: deficits get worse, debts increase, the economy slumps and people suffer.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *