A Freedom Caucus Republican says the foundation of the Trump budget is ‘a lie’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/05/24/a-freedom-caucus-republican-says-the-foundation-of-the-trump-budget-is-a-lie/?utm_term=.03f52bb6b3c2

By Mike DeBonis May 24

resident Trump’s 2018 spending plan landed in front of the House Budget Committee on Wednesday, where Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney heard plenty of criticism of the blueprint — mainly from Democrats, with one outspoken exception.

GOP Rep. Mark Sanford — a fellow South Carolinian who belongs to the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-right group Mulvaney helped found — used his five minutes of questioning at the hearing to sharply challenge the bedrock of the Trump budget: an economic growth assumption of 3 percent, one that is sharply more optimistic than those projected in recent Obama administration budgets or by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

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From there, Sanford trotted out various data points to support his claim. He called the assumption at odds with the historical record — pointing out that the current economic expansion of 94 months has already long outstripped the average American economic expansion: “But what you presume in this budget is not only will we not have a recession — though we’re in the third longest economic expansion in history — but it’s going to keep going for another 214 months. It’s not only unprecedented; I would think that to be unreasonable. It assumes that the stars perfectly align with regard to economic drivers.”

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In an interview after Wednesday’s hearing, Sanford said that he simply could not accept blind faith as a basis for the federal budget and suggested that he would not be inclined to support any budget that adopts a similarly rosy view of America’s economic future given its aging and slow-growing workforce and stagnant productivity gains.

“Whatever your budget is, just base it on real numbers and then let’s have a food fight,” he said. “But let’s not base it on fooling the American public into believing that you can do all this because we’re going to have a Goldilocks economy that we’ve never seen before.”