Trump White House to release National Socialist People’s Welfare budget Tuesday

[Valmy]

Republicans have been calling for the total abolition of those things for awhile. But surely they combined budget is less than a rounding error by this point.

[Eddie Teach]

Death of the National Endowement for the Humanities and the National Endowement for the Art, both established in 1965.

LBJ was alright, aside from dragging us into Vietnam.

[Valmy]

Eh we were already there.

[Oexmelin]

Republicans have been calling for the total abolition of those things for awhile. But surely they combined budget is less than a rounding error by this point.

Yes. There used to be a moment when Republicans cared about the arts, culture, the life of the mind, and the society to which they belonged. It is long gone. Now, it has ideologues, whose ideology is almost entirely reactionary. And these things have become symbols of all which they hate, which goes well beyond the trivial point that "the government shouldn't spend in these domains" - for it is quite clear there are only a few dogmatic libertarians. The rest is content to wallow in a patriotism of guns, and strength, and obedience, pettiness and selfishness all rolled into one, dressed in empty strings of words like "making American great again".

I continue to be astounded at the general mediocrity of the Republican caucus.

[Syt]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/opinion/trump-vs-math.html

President Trump's first budget has two themes: redistribution and innumeracy.

Let's start with the redistribution. The budget calls for shifting many billions of dollars a year from the middle class and the poor to the very richest Americans. The very rich would receive this money through tax cuts. The rest of the country would lose out thanks to cuts in government programs that touch almost every citizen, including Social Security, Medicaid and food stamps.

"On top of all of this," Jamelle Bouie of Slate writes, "Trump's budget makes substantial cuts to job-training programs, rental assistance, heating assistance for the elderly, education, and projects at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as funding for rural health and substance-abuse programs."

As for the innumeracy: The budget commits a jaw-dropping error of economic logic. Proponents of tax cuts have long argued that, while they may cause a short-term deficit, they pay for themselves in the long run by pushing economic growth (an argument not borne out by history).

The Trump budget goes even further. It imagines that the tax cuts won't even have any short-term costs. When affluent families start paying less in taxes, the shortfall will magically, and immediately, be made up.

"This is a mistake no serious business person would make," Lawrence Summers, the former treasury secretary, explains in The Financial Times. "It appears to be the most egregious accounting error in a presidential budget in the nearly 40 years I have been tracking them."

In an Op-Ed in The Times, Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calls the assumption "at odds with everything the administration has proposed and said on the issue." In The Upshot, Susan Chira and Quoctrung Bui look at the effects of Trump's budget on women.

When a president releases his budget, as journalists like to point out, the proposals do not become law. They are wish lists. Congress, not the White House, writes the more meaningful draft of the federal budget.

But a president's budget still matters. It's a sign of how an administration plans to govern. It is a statement of his administration's values and, apparently, attitude toward reality.

[CountDeMoney]

It makes perfect sense to a three-card monty shark that stiffs everybody he owes, files lawsuits against the rest, and declares bankruptcy while laundering money for Russian oligarchs for undeclared liquidity.  That's a very specific kind of accounting.

As far as the Ryan/Mulvaney group is concerned, the more federal programs zeroed out, the better.

[Syt]

German paper called him "Robin Hood of the Rich" because of the budget proposal, since he's taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

[CountDeMoney]

The poor haven't earned it.  Next time, make more money, suckers.

[Valmy]

The fact it makes us all make terrific sacrifices for absolutely nothing, the deficit will not significantly be reduced, is what I find most frustrating. Austerity without any of the benefits. I think most people would tolerate cuts if they led to a balanced budget and secured the financial footing of the government, instead it is just to fund tax cuts we cannot afford.

[Malthus]

Republicans have been calling for the total abolition of those things for awhile. But surely they combined budget is less than a rounding error by this point.

Yes. There used to be a moment when Republicans cared about the arts, culture, the life of the mind, and the society to which they belonged. It is long gone. Now, it has ideologues, whose ideology is almost entirely reactionary. And these things have become symbols of all which they hate, which goes well beyond the trivial point that "the government shouldn't spend in these domains" - for it is quite clear there are only a few dogmatic libertarians. The rest is content to wallow in a patriotism of guns, and strength, and obedience, pettiness and selfishness all rolled into one, dressed in empty strings of words like "making American great again".

I continue to be astounded at the general mediocrity of the Republican caucus.

At this point, I would be happy if they rose to the level of "mediocre". 

[Jacob]

The fact it makes us all make terrific sacrifices for absolutely nothing, the deficit will not significantly be reduced, is what I find most frustrating. Austerity without any of the benefits. I think most people would tolerate cuts if they led to a balanced budget and secured the financial footing of the government, instead it is just to fund tax cuts we cannot afford.

Come on now. "A balanced budget and secured the financial footing of the government" is just a fig-leaf to lower the taxes for rich people and hurt the cultural enemies of the Republican parties.

[Valmy]

The fact it makes us all make terrific sacrifices for absolutely nothing, the deficit will not significantly be reduced, is what I find most frustrating. Austerity without any of the benefits. I think most people would tolerate cuts if they led to a balanced budget and secured the financial footing of the government, instead it is just to fund tax cuts we cannot afford.

Come on now. "A balanced budget and secured the financial footing of the government" is just a fig-leaf to lower the taxes for rich people and hurt the cultural enemies of the Republican parties.

Is it? The Republicans have constantly undermined that goal. They did so in the 80s, the 2000s and now seem to be doing a third time. Unlike those last two times we are already in a deficit crisis though.

This is the 'starve the beast' mentality. The fact it might lead to the collapse of our country should give them pause.

The 'balanced budget and secured financial footing of the government' is what I want not what they want.

[The Minsky Moment]

OK Larry, now tell us how you really feel: http://larrysummers.com/2017/05/23/a-budget-warning/

Trump's budget is simply ludicrous

Details of President Trump's first budget have now been released.  Much can and will be said about the dire social consequences about what is in it and the ludicrously optimistic economic assumptions it embodies.  My observation is that there appears to be a logical error of the kind that would justify failing a student in an introductory economics course.
Apparently, the budget forecasts that US growth will rise to 3.0 percent because of the Administration's policies—largely its tax cuts and perhaps also its regulatory policies.  Fair enough if you believe in tooth-fairies and ludicrous supply-side economics.

Then the Administration asserts that it will propose revenue neutral tax cuts with the revenue neutrality coming in part because the tax cuts stimulate growth! This is an elementary double count.  You can't use the growth benefits of tax cuts once to justify an optimistic baseline and then again to claim that the tax cuts do not cost revenue.  At least you cannot do so in a world of logic.

The Trump team prides itself on its business background.  This error is akin to buying a company assuming that you can make investments that will raise profits, but then, in calculating the increased profits, counting the higher revenues while failing to account for the fact that the investments would actually cost some money to make. The revenue generated by the investments might exceed their cost (though the same is almost never true of tax cuts), but that doesn't change the fact that the investment has a cost that must be included in the accounting.
This is a mistake no serious business person would make. It appears to be the most egregious accounting error in a Presidential budget in the nearly 40 years I have been tracking them.
Who knew what when?   I have no doubt that there are civil servants in OMB, Treasury and CEA who do know better than this mistake.  Were they cowed, ignored or shut out?   How could the Secretary of Treasury, Director of OMB and Director of the NEC allow such an elementary error? I hope the press will ferret all this out.

The President's personal failings are now not just center stage but whole stage.  They should not blind us to the manifest failures of his economic team.  Whether it is Secretary Mnuchin's absurd claims about tax cuts not favoring the rich, Secretary Ross's claim that the small squib of a deal negotiated last week with China was the greatest trade result with China in history, NEC Director Cohn's ludicrous estimate of the costs of Dodd Frank, or today's budget, the Trump administration has not yet made a significant economic pronouncement that meets a minimal standard of competence and honesty

[Jacob]

[Valmy]

It is not Ryan's budget though, it is Trump's right?