Senate Majority Leader John Thune bashed the new report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget for not taking into account imaginary Republican pro-growth policies along with austerity, and fiscal responsibility which will he claims will reduce the federal budget, not increase it. As if this is a thing that has ever happened. How stupid do they think we are?
The CRFB reports that the Big Beastly Bill will increase federal debt by $15 trillion as written, or $31 trillion if made permanent. FIFTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS!
When Thune was questioned, he used hopes and dreams as his rationale to debunk the CRFB as not being complete. Ask the UK how austerity worked for them during the global financial collapse of 2008.
MACCALLUM: Well Rand Paul says you won’t vote for it unless it has a debt ceiling requirement in it.
Then today you have the committee for a responsible budget coming out and saying that you know in its current form as written it will add 15 trillion dollars to the debt.
We’re already at 37 trillion.
What do you say to people who look at that and say I thought we were going in the other direction?
You know what happened to a more responsible budget?
THUNE: Well we are, and this will reduce the deficit not increase it and the reason for that is one, we are going to have the biggest spending reduction in history, but secondly all the other things I mentioned Martha are going to generate growth in the economy and when you economy is growing and expanding and people are investing, you get more government revenue.
The standard rule of thumb is for about one every one percentage increase in GDP in growth in the economy you get about three trillion dollars of additional tax revenue.
So the goal here is pro-growth policies that will get the economy growing and expanding coupled with more fiscal austerity, fiscal responsibility.
There’ll be a trillion and a half to two trillion dollars in spending cuts in here, biggest spending reduction in American history. I think those two things together will mean that we will be reducing and getting that deficit trending down instead of trending up.
What a lot of those folks don’t do is they don’t take into consideration what happens when you put pro-growth policies in place and that is you get economic growth and you get more government revenue so most of them are using static models.
MACALLUM: They score without taking into account the growth side of the equation and we’ve seen that a long time we’ll see.
Poor Martha did her best to defend Thune’s illogical conclusions.
Whenever I hear a Republican use the term “pro-growth polices” as a remedy for all ills, I shudder.
That’s Larry Kudlow 101 faux economics.
It’s a Republican myth.
Even if Thune is correct on a few of his assumptions, it’s a certainty the Big Ugly bill will add trillions of dollars to the federal debt while destroying health care and killing millions of people.
(h/t Acyn)