President Trump’s Budget Includes a $2 Trillion Math Mistake






President Trump’s Budget Includes a $2 Trillion Math Mistake


May 25th, 2017

It wouldn’t be the first time. Here’s another $2.3 trillion dollar mistake that’s long forgotten:

On Sept. 10, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared war. Not on foreign terrorists, “the adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy,” he said.

He said money wasted by the military poses a serious threat.

“In fact, it could be said it’s a matter of life and death,” he said.

Rumsfeld promised change but the next day – Sept. 11– the world changed and in the rush to fund the war on terrorism, the war on waste seems to have been forgotten.

Just last week President Bush announced, “my 2003 budget calls for more than $48 billion in new defense spending.”

More money for the Pentagon, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, while its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends.

“According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,” Rumsfeld admitted.

$2.3 trillion — that’s $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America.

Two trillion here, two trillion there. *meh*

Via: Time:

President Trump’s budget includes what critics charge is a simple accounting error that adds up to a $2 trillion oversight, though the White House said it stands by the numbers.

Under the proposed budget released Tuesday, the Trump Administration’s proposed tax cuts would boost economic growth enough to pay for $2 trillion in spending by 2027. But the tax cuts are also supposed to be revenue-neutral, meaning that money is already supposed to pay for the revenue 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.

At a press conference Tuesday, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney disputed the criticism, saying that they simply assumed that the tax plan eventually passed by Congress would be revenue-neutral.

“We stand by the numbers,” he said. “We thought that the assumption that the tax reform would be deficit-neutral was the most reasonable of the three options that we had.”

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.

So what’s the most likely result of Trump’s plan? The nonpartisan group projected that the tax cuts would cost the government between $3 and $7 trillion over the next decade.















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