Thursday, October 18, 2018

Fiscal Dishonesty from Paul Ryan (Surprise!)

We earlier noted that when our Treasury Secretary wrote this:
Government receipts totaled $3,329 billion in FY 2018. This was $14 billion higher than in FY 2017, an increase of 0.4 percent...Outlays were $4,108 billion, $127 billion above those in FY 2017, a 3.2 percent increase.
He was basically lying to us hoping the public would be too stupid to realize that when the price level rose by 2.5% during the same period, we are talking about a 2% real decrease in tax revenues. And it seems that some nitwit at CNBC was indeed that stupid. Yesterday I endured an appearance by Paul Ryan on CBS This Morning. No surprise that this dishonest weasel repeated the same lie:
Revenues are up this year. Believe it or not, we cut taxes at the beginning of the year, and we have higher revenues this year. Why do we have higher revenues? Because we have faster economic growth, higher wages, more taxes are coming into the government.
But let’s give credit to John Dickerson for calling Ryan on this intellectual garbage:
Dickerson pushed back, pointing out that when you account for inflation, some of the revenues from the previous tax policy, and the revenue that would increase from population, the revenues are lower than they should be.
I would say Dickerson nailed this liar but how did Ryan respond?
Let me just say it this way. We cut taxes and we have higher revenues coming into the government today still.
Got that? He just repeated his debunked lie. After all Paul Ryan has such total disdain for the public that he simply doubled down on this incredibly stupid dishonesty.

1 comment:

Don Coffin said...

Paul Ryan: Right-wing man of extreme wonkitude...