WSJ Story Sunk By Colossal Asterisk

Continuing to bulldoze the wall between opinion and reporting, today’s Wall Street Journal uses its news pages to advance its editors’ crusade against campaign finance regulation and to stir up sympathy for the poor conservatives it — incredibly — believes are getting the short end of the big-money stick. To all those good-government types concerned that super PACs would inject unprecedented buckets of cash into the 2012 election, the WSJ offers this wisdom: Don’t worry your pretty little heads. “So far, these super PACs are looking less than super,” reporter Neil King Jr. writes. “But signs are few that super PACs have had the major impact that both supporters and critics predicted.” The gloating subtext: Boy, were you liberals stupid to get so upset over nothing. Outside spending, in the Murdochian reality, isn’t a problem at all. In fact, it hardly amounts to a hill of beans, as demonstrated by the Citizens United-fueled super PAC spending binge that never materialized.

It’s not that King doesn’t have a point when he writes that “the flood of spending doesn’t appear to have significantly influenced voter opinion in key states in the presidential contest or in top congressional races.” Indeed, despite the massive independent expenditures that have allowed Republicans to counter the Obama campaign’s fundraising advantage, the president still leads in the swing states, and chances for a GOP takeover of the Senate are slipping away. Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan are three battleground states that super PAC dollars have failed to turn into easy Romney victories. And King correctly cites the Republican primary as perhaps the ultimate super PAC triumph, when outside spending kept Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in the race past long past their sell-by dates, and when Romney’s goose was ultimately saved by Restore Our Future’s helicopter drops of cash into Florida.

But, by making a case for the futility of super PAC spending, King also sneakily makes the case for the supposedly benign influence of outside spending. If Sheldon Adelson’s millions have had “scant record of success,” then the unlimited spending ushered in by Citizens United must not be so harmful to democracy after all. (For the record, I sort of agree with that contention. But I’m not making that argument in the ostensibly neutral pages of the nation’s most widely-circulated newspaper.)

While it’s true that super PACs have not been the unstoppable financial steamrollers liberals feared, to use this fact as proof of the harmless nature of outside money misses the forest for the trees. What is missing from the WSJ article is an asterisk crucial and weighty enough to sink the Titanic. Outside money — which is predominantly conservative money, as the left’s record of super PAC and non-profit fundraising has been pathetically dismal — hasn’t flowed to super PACs because it has gone instead to 501(c)(4) groups like Crossroads GPS that, unlike American Crossroads (its super PAC counterpart) or the Romney-backing Restore Our Future, don’t have to disclose their donors.

The WSJ serves up this slick graphic to imply that the Obama campaign and its allies have an edge on Romney & Co., even when outside spending by super PACs is factored in.

It’s true that Chicago itself has more readily accessible cash than Romney, especially when one considers that much of the $180 million Republican war chest is sitting in RNC coffers and subject to restrictions that prevent it from spending on the candidate directly. The Romney campaign has only $50.4 million in cash-on-hand, considerably less than the $88 million directly available to Obama. In addition to rules that limit the amount of spending the RNC can coordinate with Boston, the National Journal observes that “money raised through joint committees, for example, is often funneled to state parties to help fund voter-contact efforts. But in that case, the cash can’t be used for TV ads with the potential to shift presidential votes on a large scale.”

The WSJ claims that the massive Republican advantage in super PAC fundraising is barely enough to offset the money pulled in by the Obama campaign and its handful of relatively weak super PACs. Indeed, Obama has been burning through his bank account for precisely this reason; without super PACs to step in, he is more heavily reliant on his own fundraising. Priorities USA, the only Democratic super PAC even attempting to play in the big leagues, raked in $10.1 million in August, outpacing Restore Our Future for the first time. But Priorities is still dwarfed by the myriad groups on the right, and a slow start to fundraising has hampered its effectiveness: In all of 2011, it took in only $4.3 million, a sharp contrast to the $30.1 million haul by Restore Out Future. And American Crossroads and its brethren continue to outpace smaller liberal groups.

But looking only at campaign and super PAC resources misses the real source of conservative cash: 501(4)c’s. These non-profits, which are not obligated to disclose their donors to the FEC, are the real London Whales of campaign finance. ProPublica offers this astounding piece of information:

Two conservative nonprofits, Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity, have poured almost $60 million into TV ads to influence the presidential race so far, outgunning all super PACs put together, new spending estimates show.

By contrast, the super PACs that the Journal paints as the only big spenders in the race outside of the campaigns — and which it suggests have not emerged as the evil influence-peddlers Democrats predicted — have coughed up a total of $55.7 million. The parties themselves? A paltry $22.5 million. ProPublica again:

Crossroads GPS, or Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, is the brainchild of GOP strategist Karl Rove, and spent an estimated $41.7 million. Americans for Prosperity, credited with helping launch the Tea Party movement, is backed in part by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, and spent an estimated $18.2 million.

The ProPublica story even comes with its own chart, which nicely counters the WSJ fallacy that all outside spending is super PAC spending.

This hardly comes as a surprise. Though liberals have latched onto the Stephen Colbert narrative of the conservative super PAC bogeyman, the big money has always been in “dark money” groups like Crossroads GPS that can conceal the sources of their donations. The Citizens United and SpeechNow rulings opened the door to unlimited independent expenditures by corporations, but it’s not hard to understand why relatively few businesses have taken up Justice Scalia’s offer. Image-conscious CEOs are reluctant to associate their brands with the politically radioactive agendas (environmental deregulation, homophobic “pro-marriage” legislation, tax cuts for the wealthy) and rhetoric (“Obama is a socialist!”) of outfits like Americans for Prosperity. Most millionaires aren’t as forthcoming about their intentions to spend the president out of office as Sheldon Adelson or the Koch brothers — and they certainly won’t be encouraged by that trio’s constant whining about government “retaliation” and “intimidation” for their activities. (Note to Adelson: If you want the government off your back, try not breaking laws against bribing officials in Macao.) 501(4)(c)s are immensely more appealing; no one ever has to know which causes you favor or which candidates you back.

It’s worth noting that, while conservatives are busy minimizing the impact of super PACs, the left deliberately exaggerates their effect. An alarmist headline on Slate contends that “78 Percent of Outside Spending Tied to Citizens United,” but the truth is more nuanced. The Sunlight Foundation report referenced in the article cites a scarily large number — $272 million in super PAC spending alone, plus another $93 million from trade associations and non-profits — but it turns out the bulk of that $272 million has been spent not on the presidential campaign but on individual Senate and House races. Somewhat incongruously, reporter Andrew McCarthy admits that “the most recent data suggests that outside groups are increasingly spending their cash on Senate and House races, while the amount directed at the top of the ballot has declined,” then makes two major errors. Not only does McCarthy contradict himself, writing that “most of the money amassed by the major super PACs has been put toward negative advertising in the presidential election” (emphasis mine), but he misrepresents the Sunlight Foundation’s findings. The next sentence, which claims that “in total, $131.1 million has been spent in opposition to President Obama,” implies that this money was spent by “major super PACs.” Follow the provided link, however, and it turns out that $131.1 million is the total independent expenditures, a category which includes not just super PAC dollars but money from the Republican National Committee (which was obviously bankrolling political ads long before Citizens United) and non-profits like Crossroads GPS. By conflating these disparate types of groups, McCarthy makes super PACs seem bigger and badder than they actually are. In fact, out of the top four big spenders, each of which has dropped $25 to $30 million on ads opposing the president, two — Americans for Prosperity and the RNC — aren’t super PACs at all. So half of the roughly $100 million spent by the top four groups had nothing to do with Citizens United. (Strangely, the Sunlight Foundation reports Crossroads GPS as having spent only $7 million; it’s not entirely clear why this number is so different from ProPublica’s figures, as even when non-presidential spending is factored in, Sunlight’s total of $18 million is nowhere close to ProPublica’s $41 million stat for presidential race spending alone.)

It is a cliche to say that the truth often lies somewhere between the extremes, but in this case the old saw seems to hold true. The WSJ suffers from serious confirmation bias when it plays into the conservative argument that, just because super PACs have proved to be more game-tweakers than game-changers, outside money has had little effect on the campaign. But Slate goes too far in the opposite direction by claiming that super PACs are steamrolling the poor Democrats, who have mustered only $50.7 million to attack Mitt Romney. One could even see Slate’s deception as more deliberately mendacious, as McCarthy makes patently false statements about the numbers from the Sunlight Foundation, while the WSJ only lies by omission.

To his credit, New York Magazine’s Frank Rich is one liberal who acknowledges that the WSJ has a point about the relative impotence of super PAC money. While writers at American Prospect and The Nation continue to gnash their teeth and rend their clothes over the Stephen Colbert bogeymen, Rich admits that “It may turn out that many, including me, were more worried about the post–Citizens United wave of money from the Kochs and Adelsons than we had to be,” though according to Rich this is only because Romney has been such a weak candidate. Unfortunately, by calling the WSJ piece “most important political story so far this week” because “it cites example after example of pro-Romney super-PAC expenditures failing to get the job done,” he commits the same errors as Murdoch’s Journal minions: he ignores the 501(4)(c) sources of real “dark money.” In their desire to cast super PACs in the most convenient partisan light, both the left and right miss the real ten-ton gorillas in the room: the non-profits, whose political spending turns their tax-exempt status as “social welfare” organizations into a cruel joke. Those groups, masquerading as do-gooders and non-partisan defenders of “American values” (capitalism, religion, free markets — take your pick), are more dangerous to democracy than anything spawned by Citizens United.

Mitt Muffs the Response. Again.

The advertising proposal obtained by the NYT

There’s little left to say about the noxious super PAC proposal for a $10 million “How to Defeat Barack Hussein Obama” ad campaign. Even Joe Ricketts, the TD Ameritrade billionaire who considered backing the ad tying the president to controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright, has disowned the effort, claiming through a spokesperson that “it reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take.” Whether Ricketts would have rejected the strategy had the Times article not provoked such an outcry is up for debate; the president of Ricketts’ super PAC “said only that no decisions had been made,” and the 54-page proposal mentions receiving his “preliminary approval at the New York meeting.”

The world of conservative super PAC funders is full of unsavory characters, however, from Sheldon Adelson (under investigation for bribing officials in Macau) to Foster Friess (noted advocate of aspirin as birth control) to the Koch brothers (specializing in climate change denial). That any of these figures would fund a race-baiting ad referring to Obama as a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln” comes as no surprise, just as it came as no surprise that the right-wing media shrugged at the news, deeming Rev. Wright “fair game” as a campaign issue. But who would have thought the politician to emerge from the kerfuffle looking the worst would be Mitt Romney? Romney’s reaction to the Ricketts proposal, not the standard-issue political slime of the proposal itself — that is what deserves more discussion.

Romney’s tepid “repudiation” of the proposal’s tactics became the latest entry in a list of weak-willed, soft-spined failures to stand up to the extremist elements of the Republican party. The candidate who bills himself as a strong leader shows precious little leadership when he refuses to condemn misogynistic remarks by Rush Limbaugh (“slut” and “prostitute” were “not the words I would have used” for Sandra Fluke) and neglects to challenge an audience member at a campaign rally who accuses the president of “treason.” Romney can’t even issue a real apology, opting to express regret “if there’s anything I said that was offensive to anyone” rather than offer a sincere “I’m sorry” for assaulting a classmate in high school.

Now, Romney buries his rejection of a truly odious smear tactic under a heap of complaints not about the relevant conservative bile but about how “character assassination has become the nature” of Obama’s campaign. It takes a lot of nerve to whine that “instead of talking about our respective ideas, what’s he’s doing is trying to attack me on a personal basis” when Romney’s own supporters are trying to brand the president as a “hyper-partisan, hyper-liberal elitist” who has “brought this country to its knees.” No, calling Obama “bumbling” and “crude” isn’t attacking him on a personal basis! Blasting the president’s “incompetence, his inability to focus on the problem at hand and his overtly political forays that make him look like he’s got something to hide” is apparently nothing compared to the Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney’s record as a “vampire capitalist.”

The statement by Romney’s campaign manager tries to shift the blame to everyone else and is, at least to my ears, the height of arrogance. Romney is dodging responsibility for the negative tone of a race in which his own rhetoric has been consistently negative:

Unlike the Obama campaign, Gov. Romney is running a campaign based on jobs and the economy, and we encourage everyone else to do the same. President Obama’s team said they would ‘kill Romney,’ and, just last week, David Axelrod referred to individuals opposing the president as ‘contract killers.’ It’s clear President Obama’s team is running a campaign of character assassination. We repudiate any efforts on our side to do so.

Romney himself makes a similar attempt to turn the tables, spoiling a perfectly honorable rejection of Ricketts’ tactics — “I want to make it very clear, I repudiate that effort. I think it’s the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign” by adding, “I’ve been disappointed in the president’s campaign to date, which has been focused on character assassination.”

Joe Ricketts (image: Nati Harnik/AP)

Maybe that’s because the candidate’s own invective really isn’t all that different from the incendiary claims made in the Ricketts proposal. The ad’s narrator asks, “How can our president stand up for America when he’s bowing, begging, kneeling and apologizing for America?” Romney himself regularly (and falsely) accuses Obama of apologizing for America, and one of Newt Gingrich’s signature lines during the primary race was his insistence that “no future president will ever again bow to a Saudi king.” And just as the Ricketts ad slams Obama for getting “caught red-handed caving to the Russians,” Romney says that “The idea that our president is planning on doing something with them that he’s not willing to tell the American people before the election is something I find very, very alarming.” The ad insists that Obama “was taught for years that America was the problem,” while Romney proclaims that “our president doesn’t have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do.”

Instead of plainly stating that the words of Obama’s former pastor are irrelevant and off-limits, Romney chooses to stand by an earlier statement, made to Sean Hannity of Fox News (who has said things about Obama nearly as risible as anything in the Ricketts ad), that called into question Obama’s Christianity. The real kicker? Romney manages to reinforce his reputation for taking so many varying stances that he can’t keep them all straight: “I stand by what I said, whatever it was.” To refresh his memory, “what I said” happened to be a discussion of the very topic — Rev. Wright — that he had just repudiated:

For the president not to understand that a wide array of religions and a conviction that Judeo-Christian philosophy is an integral part of our foundation is really an extraordinary thing. I think again that the president takes his philosophical leanings in this regard, not from those who are ardent believers in various faiths but instead from those who would like America to be more secular. And I’m not sure which is worse, him listening to Reverend Wright or him saying that we must be a less Christian nation.

Obama, for the record, never claimed that the United States should be more secular; nor did he say that it should be a “less Christian” nation. He did warn against sectarianism, and he did emphasize that “given the increasing diversity of America’s populations . . . . we are no longer a Christian nation” — i.e. Christianity is no longer the only American religion. These distinctions are lost on Romney. If the left took as much license with Romney’s remarks as Romney takes with the president’s, Priorities USA would be running ads with lines like, “Romney says U.S. should be a Judeo-Christian theocracy!”

Mitt Romney is the king of missed opportunities. When he has a chance to distance himself from the vitriolic language of his party, he demurs. When he speaks at Liberty University, whose founder John McCain famously denounced as an “agent of intolerance,” he offers bromides about shared faith, declining to challenge the rhetoric that demonizes not only the non-religious but Romney’s own Mormon religion. And true to his nature, when Romney has the opportunity to break with the sort of people who not-so-subtly emphasize the president’s middle name (Hussein! Just like Saddam!), he shies from it. Apparently it is too much to ask for the man auditioning for the highest office in the land show some backbone by distancing himself from what Greg Sargent describes as “all the marginally more ‘acceptable’ ways that leading GOP officials and opinionmakers continue to feed a deeply paranoid view of Obama as someone who doesn’t really wish the country well and harbors secret hostility towards your patriotism and religious faith and values.”

The Obama campaign issued its own broadside on character assassination, telling reporters that, “[t]oday, Mitt Romney had the opportunity to distance himself from his previous attempts to inject the divisive politics of character assassination into the presidential race. It was a moment that required moral leadership, and once again he didn’t rise to the occasion.” At the Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore offers a more analytical take on Romney’s failure of leadership, musing that, while his campaign realizes the necessity of appeasing the GOP base with red meat about Obama’s socialist leanings and connections to Saul Alinsky-type radicals, it also cannot afford to alienate crucial independent voters. “Romney and company want the crazy stuff to get out there as much as possible without being responsible for it,” Kilgore writes, then predicts the mildness of the rebukes from Boston will do little to quash the efforts of overeager, super PAC-armed billionaires like Ricketts. “It will happen again and again.”

Chicago’s Ricketts-owned Wrigley Field

Despite the serious implications of such scorched-earth tactics, Ricketts’ arrival on the political scene at least provides an element of black humor. His super PAC, which ran $600,000 worth of ads against Harry Reid in the 2010 Nevada Senate race, is called the Ending Spending Action Fund. Funny that an outfit dedicated to ending spending sees nothing ironic about issuing a statement like this one: “Joe Ricketts is prepared to spend significant resources in the 2012 election in both the presidential race and Congressional races.” Yes, in the quest to end spending, Ricketts recently dropped a cool $200,000 into the Nebraska Republican primary. Ricketts is appalled to see his tax dollars lavished on food stamps for welfare queens or tossed down the rathole of educating the next generation, but he’s perfectly fine with sinking money into TV ads that question the character of insufficiently conservative Republicans.

The hypocrisy extends to Ricketts’ business dealings. Ricketts, along with his children, has 95 percent ownership of the Chicago Cubs, and the AP reports that, “despite his limited government philosophy, the ball club is pressing for $200 million in state-backed bonds to renovate Wrigley Field, the Cubs stadium also owned by the family.” The patriarch’s political activism may come back to haunt him, however, as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — who formerly served as Obama’s chief of staff — is said to be “livid” about Ricketts’ “blatant hypocrisy” and willingness to fund the sort of “racially motivated ads that are insulting to the president and the presidential campaign.” Oops. Live by the sword, die by the sword, I guess.

Ricketts shows no shame in asking for government handouts when it benefits his pocketbook. Tim Murphy of Mother Jones points to a CBS Chicago report from April that revealed the billionaire was urging Emanuel to devote money from the city’s amusement tax to improving Cubs property:

The Cubs want to use $200 million in public funds to construct the long-planned Triangle Building along Clark Street in front of the ballpark. The Triangle Building would house team offices, a restaurant and parking, and would feature a Chicago Cubs Hall of Fame, a Cubs Pro Shop, and new ticket windows.

Murphy notes acidly that, “in fairness, ‘End the Spending—But Only When That Money is Being Spent on Other People’ would be a terrible name for a super-PAC.”

True. But really, once you’ve solicited an ad proposal that uses CGI technology to shrink President Obama into a midget — “as he walks toward us, however, the cockiness lessens and he literally gets shorter and shorter, ending up just 2-3 feet tall as he walks past camera on the left” — terrible becomes a pretty relative term.

Not Intended To Be a Factual Statement

In April 2011, after falsely claiming on the Senate floor that abortion accounts for “well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does” (it’s more like 3%), Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl explained that his remark “was not intended to be a factual statement.” The ridiculousness of the phrase attracted late-night talk show hosts and exploded on Twitter. Nearly a year later, politicians and pundits continue to make statements that one can only assume are not intended to be factual. Read on for a handful of the latest.

*****

Mitt Romney takes the cake for the most factually challenged statement of the day. In tonight’s Republican debate on CNN, Romney responded to a question about reining in spending:

I’m a guy who has lived in the world of business. If you don’t balance your budget in business, you go out of business.

The business Mitt Romney was in was private equity. Bain Capital specialized in leveraged buyouts, described by the Wall Street Journal as “acquiring control of businesses by using investors’ money amplified by debt.” Or as Newt Gingrich more colorfully put it, “the Bain model is to go in at a very low price, borrow an immense amount of money, pay Bain a great deal of money and leave.”

If Romney’s “world of business” were a country, it would apparently be one saddled by some serious national debt — and it certainly wouldn’t run a balanced budget. So much for “cap, cut and balance.” Deficit spending: it’s only bad when Democrats do it.

*****

Harold Meyerson, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, writes for the opinion section but would apparently prefer the fiction section. He offers legitimate criticism of third-party organization Americans Elect (at best, its candidate will be a Ralph Nader-esque spoiler), but then goes a step too far in attempting to demonize super PACs:

Like super PACs set up to help the candidacies of President Obama and his Republican challengers, Americans Elect is not obligated to report the identity of its funders.

Except super PACs are in fact obligated to report the identity of their funders. How else does Meyerson think the Post tracked down the hedge-fund managers and nutritional-supplement manufacturers who donated to Restore Our Future, the super PAC backing Mitt Romney? Not only are super PACs required to disclose their donors to the FEC, the billionaires who finance groups like Restore Our Future and Endorse Liberty haven’t exactly been shy about their largesse. Foster Friess, the Wyoming investor who gave over $300,000 to the super PAC supporting Rick Santorum, even appeared on MSNBC to promote the candidate and, more notably, promote Bayer aspirin as a contraceptive.

Meyerson’s error seems to stem from the American Prospect article from which his column is adapted. Parts of the op-ed are taken verbatim from the Feb. 9 piece, “Wall Street’s Third Party,” in which Meyerson writes:

[Americans Elect] claimed the status of a 501(c)(4)—primarily a social-welfare organization and thus not obliged to make public the names of its donors and the amounts of their donations. (It’s a status also claimed by the new super PACs, which are the largest spenders in this year’s Republican primaries.)

Again, this is incorrect. Not only must super PACs report their donors, but super PACs are not 501(c)(4) organizations like Americans Elect. Many super PACs are affiliated with non-profit 501(c)(4)s for precisely this reason; donors who value anonymity can give to the 501(c)(4), while limelight seekers like Foster Friess and Sheldon Adelson contribute to the super PAC itself. Karl Rove originated this two-step, establishing American Crossroads (a super PAC) as well as Crossroads GPS (a nonprofit). Meyerson would be advised to bookmark ProPublica’s handy “Guide to the New World of Campaign Finance.” Perhaps the confusion is understandable, given the alphabet soup of the tax code, but the Prospect article has been live for almost a month. It’s hard to believe no one at a major political publication has noticed the error — and even harder to believe that the editors at the Post didn’t catch it either.

*****

This line from a Wall Street Journal editorial is less a blatant distortion of the truth than a gentle massaging of it. Given that the WSJ usually just makes things up (e.g. “Obama is waging war on religion”), perhaps this is an improvement. Anyway:

Tax revenues soared after the Reagan 1981 tax cuts (the Gipper cut rates across the board by 25%) and the Bush 2003 rate reductions.

Disregarding the first bit about Reagan — I won’t pretend to know or even really care what happened 30 years ago — the second statement is nevertheless dodgy. Liberals regularly brand the notion that the Bush tax cuts raised revenue a conservative myth, and at first glance I too was ready to ding the WSJ for lying. A little digging, however, shows that PolitiFact would probably rate the statement “half-true.” (Though considering PolitiFact’s recent track record, who knows.) The editorial writer is very careful to specify the “2003 rate reductions,” though Bush cut taxes twice: once in 2001 and again in 2003. Why doesn’t the writer include the full package of tax cuts? Well, because the first round of cuts irrefutably reduced revenue. Bruce Bartlett, in a classic post on the New York Times’ Economix blog, offers the following chart from the Congressional Budget Office:

From 2001 to 2003, federal revenues dropped from $1,991 billion to $1,782, or from 19.5% of GDP to 16.2%. How convenient that the Journal chooses to gauge the success of Bush’s tax cuts only by the second round. The editorial is correct in stating that revenues increased after 2003, though as a percentage of GDP — perhaps a better measure, since it is not distorted by inflation and accounts for the fact that a growing economy naturally produces higher tax revenues — federal revenues never surpassed 2001 levels. By this metric, revenues increased, but it’s a stretch to say they “soared.”

The real slipperiness of the WSJ’s claim, however, is that it confuses correlation with causation. Even if tax revenues “soared,” did they soar because of the Bush tax cuts or in spite of them? Between 2003 and 2008, the housing bubble was expanding at light speed. The stock market was booming. Of course revenues were going up. The real question is whether the Bush tax cuts actually caused higher revenues. On that question, Bartlett reports, the CBO answers with a resounding “no.” He writes: “According to a recent C.B.O. report, they reduced revenue by at least $2.9 trillion below what it otherwise would have been between 2001 and 2011.” The cuts also added to the national debt, which the deficit hawks at the Journal also conveniently neglect to mention. In addition to the $2.9 trillion in lost revenue,

Slower-than-expected growth reduced revenue by another $3.5 trillion. Spending was $5.6 trillion higher than the C.B.O. anticipated for a total fiscal turnaround of $12 trillion. That is how a $6 trillion projected surplus turned into a cumulative deficit of $6 trillion.

But hey, who cares about subtle things like accuracy when the central Republican dogma of tax cuts = prosperity is at stake?