Gov. Tim "Dry Toast" Pawlenty To Show Off His Math Deficiency Today

by: Bill Egnor AKA Something The Dog Said

Tue Jun 07, 2011 at 06:28:45 AM MST

GOP presidential hopeful Gov. Tim Pawlenty is going to show off the fact that he and his economic team can't do simple math today. In Chicago we are going to be treated to another salvo of "flatter, fairer" tax thinking. In what will be his first major economic speech of his run for president the candidate most likely to be mistaken for plain yoghurt is going to try to make a splash.

Gov. Timmeh is reportedly going to propose massive tax cuts for everyone. He wants to slash the corporate tax rate by 20 percentage points, from 35% to 15%. He wants to end the estate tax (the WaPo article actually called it the death tax, so really objective there) as well as tax on interest income, dividends and capital gains all together.

That giant whooshing sound you hear is the money flying out of the Treasury. All of this is done under the guise of  "job creation". Leaving aside the fact that this is a doubling down of the Bush ideas about job creation and the fact that with policies like these we had a net loss of jobs over 8 years of the Bush administration, it is still mystifying to me how taking the one source of solid demand out of the economy (government spending) creates more jobs.

I know, I know, the magical thinking gene that Republican economists have is not expressing the protein I need to believe in this BS. The good news is that it also keeps me from believing in the Tooth Fairy, Big Foot or Homeopathic therapies.

He is not going to stop there though, not our Timmeh, no! He is going to propose that the there be only two (count 'em, two!) take brackets. 10% on the first 50,000 earned, then 25% on the rest. Basically Gov. Tim wants to give the top earners, a 28% tax break on top of the other breaks they've had. Now even a confused and math impaired Republican knows that you can't take the much revenue out of the government and not have an instant debt crisis.  

Another bright idea that the whiter than sour-cream former Governor is going to propose is something he calls the "Google test".  From the Washington Post article:

He will propose applying a "Google" test to federal services, meaning if private businesses can be found on the Internet to perform the same function, "then the federal government probably doesn't need to be doing it."

Yeah, that's right he is going to search the internet to see if anyone anywhere does for a profit what the Federal Government does at cost and then privatize that industry. What are the examples that he gives? Amtrak, the Federal Printing Office, Fannie May and Freddy Mac and, wait for it, the Post Office.

The last one makes me crazy. The Post Office does not cost the federal government anything. Not a thin dime. It runs on the cost of shipping and stamps. While the cost has gone up as electronic communication come to the fore, the reality is it does a great job at a very cheap price.

The question I would ask Gov Timmeh is, if you get the government out of these businesses and nothing appears to take up the slack or the private businesses fail, will you put restart the government programs? I think that that answer is probably not.

The other examples are also things that we should be supporting anyway. While we have had a problem with Freddy and Fanny, the fact is they have helped to keep our anemic housing market alive by underwriting most of the mortgages over the last 3 years. Without them we would be in far worse shape today.

Then there is Amtrak. Yes it loses money. Yes it could be more efficient, but if we do not have a federal company that drives train usage we will never get to the High Speed Rail that must be part of our national future. The cost of flying is only going to increase, as is the cost (rolled up with road maintenance, pollution and traffic fatalities) of over-the-highway trucking. Rail is the only way that we can reduce the various costs of transport, even though the front end cost will be high. Without Amtrak I seriously doubt we will do it.

All of this is bad enough Republican Bizzaro World economics, but the last really is the best distorted mirror of this entire fun house. Timmeh says that he knows how to balance the budget! He is going to do it by cutting 1% of the budget a year for the next six years which he says will balance the budget by 2017!

This is where the math impairment of the Republicans really shows. The 2010 federal budget was 3.4 trillion dollars. At 1% that means a President Timmeh (gods lesser and greater preserve us all!) would cut 10 billion for every trillion in the budget or 30.4 billion a year. A total of something less than 180 billion taken out of the budget (since it will be 1% of the previous year's budget) and all our troubles are over!

Of course that can't be true. And I'll give you two guesses where those cuts will come from, the 13% of the budget that is considered discretionary spending. It won't come out of the bloated Defense budget that is for damned sure.

If this speech is intended to make Gov. Timmeh look serious, it is probably going to fail the laugh test. Not only will his numbers be excoriated by the likes of Paul Krugman and other economist who still live in the consensus reality, he is not going to make the Teahadists very happy either. After all his cuts are 1/3 of what the Republicans promised for 2011. From the Right he is going to look good on taxes bad on spending. From the Left he is just going to look like someone that can't count to 21 without taking off his shoes and unzipping his pants.

While it is going to be a dark kind of fun watch this guy spout gibberish it is really a sad commentary that this is one of the so-called "sane" Republicans running for president this cycle.

The floor is yours.