Annals of derp: The importance of bearding Earnest

Face Josh Earnest makes when he's responding to a question from Conn Carroll. From Townhall.

This is a pretty classic case, but it may take a while to get to the punchline. Somebody called Conn Carroll at Townhall, reporting how he asked the tough questions:

I get the St. Kitts ad because I was reading about Alexander Hamilton. Google knows everything, but they know it slant. 

Yesterday I asked White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest to justify White House claims that President Obama's immigration executive actions reduce federal deficits in light of a letter from the Congressional Budget Office showing that they increase on-budget deficits by $8.8 billion. 

Earnest then claimed that I was reading the letter wrong, and that the letter actually said that Obama's immigration actions reduced deficits by $8 billion.

I then acknowledged that Earnest was half right. That if you consider the unified budget, in other words if all federal taxes, including payroll taxes, go into just one big general fund, then the CBO letter did say that Obama's immigration actions do reduce deficits by $7.5 billion over ten years.

I'm afraid our excitable Mr. Carroll misheard Mr. Earnest, who did not actually characterize that CBO letter as saying that the actions would reduce deficits: he said choosing his words pretty carefully, as presidential press secretaries are wont to do,

MR. EARNEST:  We may have to follow up with you on this,  because my reading of that report was actually that removing the executive actions would actually add $8 billion to the deficit.

Which makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. Because the president's proposals add millions of DACA and DAPA beneficiaries to the legal work force, where they'll be paying payroll taxes, and if the House Republicans have their way, those payroll taxes won't exist. Or as Earnest went on to say,

Well, I may have somebody who is more steeped in the budgetary details.  My understanding is that this would have a positive impact on our deficit precisely because for the first time what we’d be doing is we’d be bringing people out of the shadows and actually making them pay taxes.  That would be a good thing for the life of Social Security.  It would be a good thing for our economy.  And ultimately, it would be a good thing for the deficit.

Which is in fact what the CBO letter says, because it's not about the consequences of Obama's immigration orders, it is about the budget-busting consequences of HR 240, the bill passed in the House of Representatives to CANCEL the executive orders:

Net Effect on the Deficit 

Under H.R. 240, as passed by the House, both revenues and direct spending would be lower than under current law. However, the drop in revenues would be greater than the drop in direct spending. Deficits for the unified budget would increase by $7.5 billion over the 2015-2025 period, as compared to projected deficits under current law. As the majority of the forgone revenue would be for Social Security payroll taxes, enacting sections 579 and 580 would increase the off-budget deficit by about $16.3 billion over that same period. In contrast, the on-budget deficit would improve by $8.8 billion over the 2015-2025 period. 

I assume Earnest still hasn't imagined that Carroll is reading the document backwards, because why would he? I only figured it out because I started with Carroll's assertions and then looked back at his evidence, where Earnest started with his knowledge of the truth and then tried, hopelessly, to figure out what Carroll meant. Poor Mr. Carroll got so excited he didn't notice! Blinded by tears of eager desire.