Chait: Trump budget relies on 2 Trillion $ Math Error

[Badger]

The budget guy in the executive branch missed this?  That seems hard to believe. Yes, I believe it of Trump, but not from his bean counters.

Torie, knowing everything everything we do about Trump and his being more reliant on yes men than literally any human being on the planet, why should the jettisoning of all truth in any calculations coming out of the White House be remotely surprising? 

[Badger]

"Error" implies this was a mistake and not just the most shameless example yet of a kind of double counting that happens very often in DC.

There have been countless Rosie projections for budgets in Washington, sure. Mostly along the lines of projecting particularly and not altogether realistic economic growth to artificially increased Revenue, particularly when coupled with tax cuts that will supposedly stimulate the economy. This however is entirely on a new plane where it is absolute complete double Counting. It is the mathematical equivalent of saying two plus two equals 6 buy double counting the first two. It's unprecedented and it's grotesque dishonesty and disdain for the American public in their ability to see what's going on

[Badger]

The Bush administration also claimed that cutting taxes increases revenues.

http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2011/07/bush-white-house-said-tax-cuts-increase-revenue.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikepatton/2012/10/15/do-tax-cuts-increase-government-revenue/#4f85545b4bf2

For an opposing viewpoint...

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ETA: The author is the head of the Accounting Department and holds the Frank M. Burke Chair in Taxation at Texas Tech University: https://www.depts.ttu.edu/rawlsbusiness/people/faculty/accounting/robert-ricketts/

And Forbes is basically a supply-side rag. Nuff said.

[Badger]

"Error" implies this was a mistake and not just the most shameless example yet of a kind of double counting that happens very often in DC.

There have been countless Rosie projections for budgets in Washington, sure. Mostly along the lines of projecting particularly and not altogether realistic economic growth to artificially increased Revenue, particularly when coupled with tax cuts that will supposedly stimulate the economy. This however is entirely on a new plane where it is absolute complete double Counting. It is the mathematical equivalent of saying two plus two equals 6 buy double counting the first two. It's unprecedented and it's grotesque dishonesty and disdain for the American public in their ability to see what's going on

lol double counting is not unprecedented.  only usually it's just hundreds of billions of dollars.

No, there have been plenty of examples of inflating the revenue effects of tax cuts or revenue projections in general, but find one legit example of bona-fide double counting.

One can't play the "everyone does it" to excuse Trump. It's a whole new level of cheating.