I Brad knows his calculus
Posted on February 3rd, 2004 by
You may not need to be a professor of economics at Berkeley to figure out that Bush’s budget projections have holes big enough to drive mobile biological weapons trailers through them, but it seems to help. Professor DeLong asks:
Isn’t the fact that extending the Bush tax cuts would blow an annual $250 billion hole in the budget in the 2009-2012 presidential term worth mentioning in the first ten paragraphs–not in paragraph 26?
The full story can be found here.
Damn elitist economists. Here in the red states we don’t need any fancy degrees.
Prof. DeLong’s point does seem worthy of note — even in the ridiculously unlikely event that Bush actually managed to cut the budget deficit in half by 2009, making the tax cuts permanent would bring the deficit right back to where it started. And of course in the far more likely event that Bush failed to cut the deficit in half, making the tax cuts permanent would result in another new world record budget deficit (call Guinness!). btw, have you ever noticed that the anagram of “Brad DeLong” is “golden bard”?
Jonathan Weisman writes that that piece was “slapped together as quickly as possible”–i.e., that the reason 90% of it reads like a rewritten White House press release is that 90% of it is a rewritten White House press release.
Which raises the question, why would anybody rewrite a White House press release and put it out as the lead news story on the Washington Post’s website?