Must-Read: Actually, Kevin Hassett made the same large error (one of many, many very large errors) in his Dow 36000: counting both retained earnings as if they were profits distributed to shareholders and then also counting the extra future growth in dividends that not paying them to shareholders now—retaining and reinvesting these earnings—made possible. This does not come as a surprise to me:
Larry Summers: A warning on Trump’s budget: "You cannot use the growth benefits of tax cuts once to justify an optimistic baseline and then again to claim that the tax cuts do not cost revenue... https://www.ft.com/content/2ae4722a-f82f-3bbe-aba1-5b89dd8ac314
...This... is akin to buying a company assuming that you can make investments that will raise profits, but then, in calculating the increased profits, counting the higher revenues while failing to account for the fact that the investments would actually cost some money to make.... The investment has a cost that must be included in the accounting. This is a mistake no serious business person would make. It appears to be the most egregious accounting error in a presidential budget in the nearly 40 years I have been tracking them...
Even non-serious people don't make this mistake, Larry. This is a grift pure and simple.
