A couple trillion here, a couple trillion there. No matter how many times Trump's budget team tries to reuse the same fake money, that doesn’t make it real.
President Donald Trump's newly unveiled budget contains a massive accounting error that uses the same money twice for two different purposes. Based on its supersized projections of 3 percent GDP, the president's budget forecasts about $2 trillion in extra federal revenue growth over the next 10 years, which it then uses to pay for Trump's "biggest tax cut in history."
Actually, since the whole idea that Trump’s currently unformulated tax cut is going to generate an extra $2 trillion is complete hokum, why not let Trump use it twice? Why not use it four times? Why not 10? Why … Donald Trump’s budget eliminates the national debt in six weeks, plus it will help you drop 20 pounds and eliminate crepey elbow skin!
The whole purpose of the entirely intentional accounting “mistake” is that it allows Trump to maintain the pretense that he can throw ridiculous sums at the military, cut even more monstrous refund checks for the wealthy, and still “balance the budget.”
White House budget director Mick Mulvaney didn't deny the math, saying it was done "on purpose," during a press briefing Tuesday.
There’s an obscure accounting term used when you don’t report the correct numbers on purpose—it’s called fraud.
Mulvaney gives the whole thing a hand wave.
"I'm aware of the criticisms and would simply come back and say there's other places where we were probably overly conservative in our accounting," he said. "We stand by the numbers."
He’s saying that, somewhere in the budget, the numbers are so vague that it more than makes up for a $2 trillion mistake. Sorry—not a mistake. That would be $2 trillion worth of intentional fraud.
Even if Mulvaney was telling the truth about that, which he isn’t, the budget he just handed in is so far from reality that there are $2 trillion errors hiding in some unspecified location. It’s so far off that it has holes you could literally drive the entire annual budget through. If the budget is that bad, what was the point of submitting it in the first place? If it’s that bad, there’s nothing there to even consider.
But of course, there is a purpose for the budget. It stakes out a position where they kill the poor, children, and the environment just to front the bill to benefit the wealthy and fatten defense contractors. Republicans don’t expect to win on all those fronts. They’ll settle for merely maiming the poor, children, and the environment.
And the purpose of the $2 trillion on-purpose-mistake is to allow Trump to declare that he is balancing the budget—when Barack Obama didn’t—even though his budget is worse in every way imaginable. That’s not fraud. It’s just a lie.