I still feel like crap today. On the bright side, I feel slightly less like crap than yesterday. Nevertheless, that probably means I should stick to nice, easy subjects. I think I managed to screw up yesterday’s post about the income of the top 1 percent five or six times before I finally got it right.¹

The Republican tax bill is always good for an easy post. Let’s try that. Here’s the latest Penn Wharton estimate of the effects of the bill all the way through 2040²:

There you go. By 2040, more than two decades from now, the Senate bill will create an extra $2 trillion in debt. At the same time, it will increase both GDP and labor income by 0.5 percent. That’s 0.02 percent per year, which is basically noise level. We can’t even come close to measuring GDP that accurately. For all practical purposes, the likely effect of the bill on GDP and labor income is zero.

No one in the Republican Party seems to care about that, and charts full of numbers don’t have any impact on the average voter. Still, just for the record, I figure it’s worth posting this stuff. Someone ought to.

¹It’s now correct, and probably fairly understandable too. Thanks, readers!

²The Penn Wharton folks produce both high and low estimates. I’ve averaged them here to get a single number for each category.