President Donald Trump‘s latest budget proposal has already sparked controversy for its unique cruelty toward the poor, cutting food stamps by $192 billion, Medicaid by $800 billion, and welfare by $21 billion. These are all staggering and completely unwarranted cuts, but arguably the most unsettling aspect of the new Trump budget is its $2 trillion math mistake.
From TIME Magazine:
“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.”
In essence, Trump’s budget was created on the assumption that tax cuts would spur enough economic growth — a rate of precisely 4.5 percent over the next 10 years — for the budget to be viable, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. This rate is 2.5 times the growth rate projected by the Congressional Budget Office, leaving roughly $2 trillion unaccounted for.
Republican Sen. John McCain has already called the budge proposal “dead on arrival” in Congress, and former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers called the mistake “a logical error of the kind that would justify failing a student in an introductory economics course” in a Washington Post op-ed.
Donald Trump's budget is based on a hilarious accounting fraud. https://t.co/HQlAxMff58 pic.twitter.com/1pk1Pp9iYy
— Bruce Bartlett (@BruceBartlett) May 23, 2017
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget speculates that the proposed budget would cost the government between $3 and $7 trillion over the next 10 years, not to mention ruin the lives on America’s poor and sick.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore
