That was a snarky response that I now see wasn't deserved based on your previous post. My initial reaction was that Trump was closer to adding $1.5T/year to the deficit with tax cuts and spending increases than $150B/year, which is why I thought you might be crossing them up. In any case, I'm sorry to have been rude.

I understand the theory that tax cuts lead to economic growth. It is baked into the CBO projections that I included. Certainly there is a return on those cuts, so you get some of the money back. But years of research has shown that the multiplier is not greater than 1, so you don't get all the money back. That's also shown in the CBO projections. Projections are just that and won't be exact. But Boca's post in this thread shows that when you adjust for inflation the revenues are down relative to 2016 after adjusting for inflation. The figure below shows the difference when you account for inflation relative to the original projection. This CBO post (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/54994) indicates that economic growth was stronger than the original projections anticipated but that the tax cuts are still a major contributor to the growing deficit as of 2019. We can debate whether the sum of the effects would have come out to $1.5T or not in a COVID-free world in the universe where spending policy held steady for a decade, but we'll never know. If your argument is that we actually would have generated more revenue in inflation-adjusted dollars in the next decade than we were on pace to pre-tax cut then I think the evidence from 2019 and from many analyses don't support that claim.

Your third paragraph is rather philosophical compared to the world we actually live in. I get that a projection is not actually a dollar (or a trillion) lost, but we have no better way to evaluate the effects of policy. Your comment about spending also ignores inflation. Our budget is going to go up every year unless we enact dramatic cuts just because of inflation. Most of those costs are baked in as mandatory spending and COLA adjustments for federal employees, soldiers, etc. As I noted about non-defense discretionary spending, we can't practically just zero it out and even if we could we would still have a deficit of $300B in 2019. We have to operate in a world where we account for future budgets in a realistic way, which means trying to balance the revenue that the government takes in and the money that it spends through long term projections. The federal budget doesn't turn on a dime so that you can just match outgoing costs with tax receipts each year. Cutting tax rates and then saying that because the spending kept on moving at its previous growth rate the spending is the problem ignores all of that.

I appreciate the perspective in the 4th paragraph. That debate is one that we should be having in this country even if it has to be done with less simplistic discussion. The one question I have there is whether you're including entitlement spending in those numbers, because you still can't reasonably get there without addressing entitlements in some way. I would think that a combination of sequestration on all discretionary spending, reasonable tax increases like you outlined, and social security and medicare reform would be the goal. Sadly those last two may not be on the table soon enough to make any difference for the baby boom retirement. They should have been addressed under Bush, but the GOP congress in 2005 didn't have the guts. I'm pretty frustrated with the hypocrisy of the GOP turning around and arguing about deficits after 4 years of Trump, but the net effect on our fiscal health might be improved if we go back to the sequestration era of Dem president and GOP congress.