This made me laugh, until I realized who the joke was on:
Could you loan me ten dollars but just give me five? That way you'll owe me five, I'll owe you five, and we'll be even.”
Conveniently, today the Congressional Budget Office released their update to their budget and economic outlook, so I have some updated numbers for my Bush/Obama tax cuts version of that joke:
President Obama: “Could you loan me ten dollars $2.65 trillion for 10 years' worth of all of the Bush tax cuts but just give me five about $2 trillion for the “middle-class” ones? That way you'll owe me five, I'll owe you five, and we'll be even about $700 billion, and I'll say “no problem, keep it,” and I'll claim to have reduced the deficit by that $700 billion.“
They make the tax code and federal financing schemes so complicated nobody can understand them. But we all know bs when we hear it.
