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Article snippet: The unveiling of President Trump’s first budget and the initial congressional hearings on overhauling the tax code should have brought clarity to the administration’s top legislative priorities. That didn’t happen. Instead, testimony from Mr. Trump’s top economic advisers cast even darker shadows over a murky legislative process that has fallen well behind schedule. Their explanations of the budget and their tax plans in public seemed to generate more questions with almost every answer. Here’s where things stand. The most confounding aspect of the White House budget was that it appeared to double count the effects of economic growth. It appears to improperly use the economic expansion that it predicts its policies will produce to both pay for tax cuts and reduce the deficit. Senator Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, told Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Thursday that the administration was using accounting that would “make Bernie Madoff blush.” After being called out for using fuzzy math, Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, explained at a congressional hearing on Thursday that the administration used a tax plan placeholder in its budget that was revenue neutral on a “static” basis. The meaning? That it was not counting on economic growth to pay for its hypothetical plan. This implied that the White House planned to compensate for any revenue lost through tax cuts by curbing deductions or finding ways to raise revenue... Link to the full article to read more