Conservative Website Forbes offers a detailed point-by-point of Trump’s economic failure, offering a grim preview of coming events.
Stan Collender, an executive vice president in the Washington, D.C. office of Qorvis MSLGROUP, has an impressive resume when it comes to fiscal policy – that is, policy as it relates to government revenue, especially taxes.
As his official corporate bio notes:
Collender has extensive experience on Capitol Hill and is considered to be one of the world’s leading experts on the U.S. budget and Wall Street’s response to Washington tax and spending proposals. He is one of only a handful of people who has worked for the House and Senate Budget Committees, and has worked for three U.S. representatives who served on the House Budget or Ways and Means Committees.
That knowledge was on full display on Sunday when he wrote a scathing analysis of Trump’s “budget recklessness” for Forbes, emphatically stating that: “Trump is the most fiscally irresponsible president in recent American history…and quite possibly of all time.”
Collender explained that his article was prompted by a tweet by Trump calling on the Senate to act on funding issues before the start of the fiscal year.
The Senate should get funding done before the August break, or NOT GO HOME. Wall and Border Security should be included. Also waiting for approval of almost 300 nominations, worst in history. Democrats are doing everything possible to obstruct, all they know how to do. STAY!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2018
“I’m posting this now because this tweet from just a week ago made me realize yet again that Trump’s budget recklessness continues to reach new lows,” he wrote.
Continuing, he wrote:
As someone who has railed about this administration’s and Congress’s lack of attention to appropriations and budget process deadlines, seeing Trump demand action before the start of the fiscal year was refreshing.
But think about why Trump is asking for rapid action on the 2019 appropriations: He wants even more spending. Even though his policies have spiked the annual budget deficit to a new normal of a $1 trillion (with $2 trillion definitely within view) and interest rates are now starting to go up in large part because of his out-of-sync-with-the-economy stimulative fiscal policy, Trump is demanding that federal spending and the government’s red ink be increased even further.
Restating the theme of his article, that: “Trump is the most fiscally irresponsible president in recent American history…and quite possibly of all time,” Collender wrote that “Trump’s behavior on everything and anything having to do with the federal budget has become blatantly predictable and painfully obvious. It always includes some combination of:”
1. Proposing whatever he wants on revenues and spending regardless of whether it is the right policy for the economy.
2. Making up his own rules of economics, mathematics and budgeting to justify what’s being proposed and make them politically palatable.
3. Discrediting the facts when they get in the way of what he wants to do and demeaning those that produce them.
4. Ignoring reality when what actually happens turns out very different from what he swore would occur.
5. Paying no attention whatsoever to the budget deficit and national debt.
He also offered a four-part analysis of Trump’s tax package, writing that it “demonstrates every ingredient of this witches’ brew.”
First, the bill’s $1.5 trillion revenue loss, debt increase and stimulus was the absolute wrong fiscal policy with the economy so strong.
Second, no amount of Trump insistence and bullying about dynamic scoring was going to make that tax cut revenue neutral.
Third, even when they came from Republican-led groups like the Joint Economic Committee, nonpartisan groups like the Congressional Budget Office and Wall Street, the analyses (and those that did them) showing Trump to be wrong were trashed by the White House.
Fourth, now that the tax cut has been enacted, Trump doesn’t seem to care that his promise of a deficit-neutral bill was flat out wrong even though it will cause the budget deficit to reach record heights in good economic times.
After noting that the so-called “tax cut” was but one example of Trump’s incompetence, Collender concluded his analysis, writing:
The worst thing about all of this is that, even after his policies have done so much damage, neither Trump nor any other members of his economic policy team — Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow and Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Kevin Hassett — have even hinted about there being a problem that requires attention and a change in attitude and direction.
In fact, even in the face of interest rates hitting new recent highs and concerns increasingly being raised on Wall Street about an economic slowdown, Trump has said nothing except, that is, to tweet that he wants to make the situation even worse.
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