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Treasury released a one-pay document, that says that the tax-cuts will pay for themselves, contrary to every analysis of the tax bill.
How did he do it? It's easy, make unfounded assumptions about economic growth. By the way, this report, such as it is, wasn't done by the over 100 people in Treasury “working around the clock on running scenarios for us.” It just seems to be made up and there wasn't any staff assigned to any major analysis.
[h=1]Mr. Mnuchin’s Magical Math on Taxes[/h]
Paul Krugman weighed in too:
[h=1]Steve Mnuchin Pulls a Paul Ryan[/h]
How did he do it? It's easy, make unfounded assumptions about economic growth. By the way, this report, such as it is, wasn't done by the over 100 people in Treasury “working around the clock on running scenarios for us.” It just seems to be made up and there wasn't any staff assigned to any major analysis.
[h=1]Mr. Mnuchin’s Magical Math on Taxes[/h]
It [the report] projects a budget surplus created by 2.9 percent annual growth in gross domestic product over 10 years — that’s more than 50 percent faster than the most recent forecast by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Half of that growth would come from corporate tax cuts, the other half from other tax cuts and regulatory reform and from “infrastructure development and welfare reform,” neither of which has advanced past the talking stage.
Scott Greenberg, a tax analyst at the conservative Tax Foundation, called the one-pager “a thought experiment on how federal revenues would vary under different economic effects of overall government policies. Which is, needless to say, an odd way to analyze a tax bill.”
No other analysis — not from Congress, bipartisan tax policy groups, economists, past Republican Treasury secretaries — supports these claims. Instead, most experts say the bill would add at least $1 trillion to the debt.
Paul Krugman weighed in too:
[h=1]Steve Mnuchin Pulls a Paul Ryan[/h]
Even reporters hardened to Trump administration lies seemed shocked by the brazenness of this bait-and-switch. What made Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, think he could get away with it?
Well, one answer is that similar scams on the part of congressional Republicans, Paul Ryan in particular, have generally received highly respectful treatment from the news media. Why shouldn’t Mnuchin imagine he can pull off the same trick?
...
About that Treasury report: The department has an Office of Tax Policy, or O.T.P., which provides “economic and legal policy analysis” for tax policy decisions. Normally we’d expect this office to carry out a full analysis of the effects of Republican tax bills, similar to those conducted by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation and by independent, nonpartisan organizations like the Tax Policy Center.
But either O.T.P. didn’t do that, or it did an analysis that Mnuchin is suppressing. (The department’s inspector general is investigating what actually happened, because Mnuchin repeatedly claimed to have such an analysis in hand.) If the experts actually did do an analysis, they probably found what everyone else has found — namely, that tax cuts come nowhere near to paying for themselves.