The Trump Administration’s 2018 budget numbers were released on Tuesday.
The budget forecasts the US economy to grow by 3.0% every year for the next then years. Well – the U.S. economy grew 1.6% in 2016, and for the next ten years the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a team of economists, projects it to be 1.8%. That’s an enormously lower figure than 3.0%.
Then, the budget assumes that the Trump Administration’s proposed tax cuts would boost economic growth enough (again, extremely unlikely to be 3%) to pay for $2 trillion in additional spending (on the military, for example) by 2027. But the Trump tax cuts are also supposed to be revenue-neutral, a phrase that already accounts for the $2 trillion. The $2 trillion cannot be used twice in the budget! Yes, yes, never mind all that, countered Budget Director Mick Mulvaney when this was pointed out to him. ‘We stand by the numbers’.
All this nonsense and sloppiness from a White House team of billionaires, many from Goldman Sachs, calling themselves business people and economically savvy.
