My Comments: I am relatively powerless as one of some 325M people living in these United States of America. But I have a voice and at least a few people read my blog posts.

I’m disturbed by 45’s apparent glee in ceding global economic and moral leadership to China and Germany and other nations. I’ve concluded he’s actually Our Man in DC. That is, Moscow’s Man in DC.

Universal health care is becoming the accepted norm among these 325M Americans. We are a wealthy nation, and our values, developed over 250 years and more suggest it’s appropriate to take care of our elderly, our children, our less fortunate brethren.

But there are those in 45’s inner circle whose expressed values significantly contradict my values. I’m happy there exists a potential Bulls**t Obliterator to help draw attention to this.

By Jon Perr \ Sunday May 28, 2017

This past week was a very big one for some very big promises from Republicans in Washington. It didn’t go well for them.

Three weeks after House Republicans voted to pass a new version of their “American Health Care Act,” the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) weighed in on high-profile pledges from President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan. While Trump guaranteed “insurance for everybody” that is “much less expensive and much better,” Ryan insisted the revised AHCA “protects people with pre-existing conditions.” Not content to rest there, HHS Secretary Tom Price boasted that Trumpcare’s $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid will “absolutely not” result in millions losing coverage.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration also unveiled its fiscal year 2018 budget proposal. With its draconian spending cuts to the social safety net programs, the White House blueprint was proclaimed “dead on arrival” even by some Republicans. But more embarrassing to Donald Trump was its double-counting of $2 trillion in revenue for Uncle Sam magically generated by “sustained, 3 percent economic growth.” As Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin declared a month ago, “the plan will pay for itself with growth.”

Unfortunately for the White House and GOP leaders on Capitol Hill, the CBO demolished all of those Republican myths. Again. That’s because whether the issue is health care, taxes, job numbers, or the impact of the President Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus, the acronym “CBO” doesn’t just stand for “Congressional Budget Office.” It’s also shorthand for “Conservative Bulls**t Obliterator.”

As it turns out, in recent years that’s been true even when Republicans have their hand-picked choice running the agency.

Consider, for starters, the decades-old GOP myth that “tax cuts pay for themselves.” In January 2015, the new Republican majorities in the Senate and House selected former Bureau of Labor Statistics chief Keith Hall to lead CBO. But by that August, Hall had some bad news for the Red team: “No, the evidence is that tax cuts do not pay for themselves. And our models that we’re doing, our macroeconomic effects, show that.”

Of course, it’s not just a question of economics models, but more than 40 years of economic history. Almost from the moment that Arthur Laffer first sketched his now-famous curve on a napkin in 1974, right-wing pundits, politicians, and propagandists have declared as an article of faith the belief that tax cuts incentivize so much economic growth that revenues to Uncle Sam will be at least as high as they would have been without the reduction in rates. Unfortunately for the American people, four decades of supply-side snake oil have produced only mushrooming national debt and record-high income inequality. Far from paying for themselves, the Reagan and Bush tax cuts delivered a windfall only for the wealthy while unleashing oceans of red ink from the United States Treasury. It’s no wonder why every economist surveyed by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2012 and again in 2017 disagreed with the claim that “a cut in federal income tax rates in the US right now would raise taxable income enough so that the annual total tax revenue would be higher within five years than without the tax cut.”

As former Obama administration economist Austan Goolsbee put it:
Moon landing was real. Evolution exists. Tax cuts lose revenue. The research has shown this a thousand times. Enough already.

But the CBO is hardly finished in debunking the rubbish being shoveled by Messrs. Trump, Mnuchin, and Mulvaney. Candidate Trump didn’t just promise average annual economic growth of 4 percent during the campaign. The White House web site currently pledges “to get the economy back on track, President Trump has outlined a bold plan to create 25 million new American jobs in the next decade and return to 4 percent annual economic growth.” No President since JFK and LBJ ever achieved that target. When Mulvaney and Mnuchin promised 3 percent GDP growth over the next decade, their rosy scenario represented a 1.1-point gap over CBO’s forecast of 1.9 percent.