By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Nov. 14, 2015
Recently, I performed some sophisticated data crunching on a Tax Foundation analysis of the tax-reform plans of seven Republican presidential candidates. (Which is to say, I typed the data from this Tax Foundation table into a spreadsheet and divided certain numbers by 10.) After comparing the results to historic U.S. budget deficits, I concluded that:
[A]ll of these tax proposals would be budget busters, creating some of the largest annual deficits in U.S. history. If enacted, and if they worked as projected, either government services would have to be cut dramatically or tax rates would have to be increased in order to prevent the national debt from ballooning. And given the political scene, the former option would be far more likely to be enacted.
However, there’s a catch.
The catch is that the Tax Foundation projected potential budget surpluses or deficits for the Republican proposals using two different methods. The numbers I relayed in my previous post were produced using static revenue estimates, a technique that has long been employed by government budget analysts.