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Math And Its Well-Known Liberal Bias

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The very, very, very Serious Paul Ryan is still going on about the deficit. He’s also proposing massive upper-class tax cuts, and arguing that his budget will somehow the avoid savage cuts to programs to the poor the two policies would make inevitable if we’re supposed to take the initial premise seriously. How can he reconcile this? DYNAMIC SCORING!

Ryan has found himself caught between his career-long obsession with cutting taxes for the rich and the problem of what happens to the revenue that would be lost. During the 2012 campaign, he swept aside the problem by couching his plan as “tax reform,” promising not to cut taxes for the rich. Ryan’s new plan is just to go ahead and cut taxes.

He tells Klein, “Those of us who live in the tax system want to lower everybody’s tax rates.” If you lower everybody’s tax rates, then everybody will be paying less in taxes, and then the government will have less revenue, right? That’s where Ryan’s solution comes in: He plans to press the government budget agencies to adopt the optimistic assumption he prefers, which is that cutting tax rates for the rich creates faster economic growth. Ryan spent much of the Bush years assailing what he called “static scoring,” which is the standard budget practice of measuring the fiscal impact of tax cuts as if they do not contain magic pixie dust.

As Danny Vinick has noticed, Ryan has announced his intention to change the rules. Ryan reaffirmed that plan in his interview with Klein: “I’d like to improve our scorekeeping so it better reflects reality,” he said. “Reality” is Ryan’s description for a world in which Bill Clinton’s punishing tax hikes on the rich hindered the economy, which was restored to health when George W. Bush cut taxes.

If only there was a state that enacted massive upper-class tax cuts, only that because it’s a state it couldn’t just use the George W. Bush approach of just running massive deficits when tax revenues came in under expectations. Then we could see if tax cuts produced so much dynamic economic growth that they actually increased revenue. Sadly, we’ll never know.

In related news, the Republican health care is “nothing but the 2009 status quo ante.”

good Sunflower State roundup from DeLong.

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