Paul Ryan get Tax Cut backing from Fake Economist, a convicted forger, a low-level Tax Department office assistant at the New York State...

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Any thinking person would try saving and funding our social programs the normal way, step by step, until they’re improved, leaner, more effective, and fully funded. Then they would have every right to talk about tax cuts or tax increases.

House Speaker Paul Ryan released a letter this week signed by 137 economists who say they strongly endorse the Republican legislation. But a review of the economists listed on the letter reveals a number of discrepancies, including economists that are supposedly still academics but are actually retired, and others who have never been employed as economists. One might not even exist … Gil Sylvia of the University of Georgia … a university representative told The Intercept that no one with the name Gil Sylvia is employed there.

Wait, there’s more…

Another signatory to the RATE letter, Seth Bied, is not an economist. He is a low-level office assistant at the New York State Tax Department, whose spokesperson said Bied does not remember signing the economists’ letter.

Other names on the economists’ letter may raise eyebrows. John P. Eleazarian is listed as an economist with the American Economic Association. Eleazarian is a former attorney who lost his law license and the ability to practice law in California after he was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison for forging a judicial signature and falsifying other documents.

Others on the list are part of advocacy groups that have made tax cuts their biggest legislative priority. James C. Miller III, one of the signatories, is an official with Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers-run advocacy organization hellbent on passing tax cut legislation. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, another signatory, is head of the American Action Forum, the sister group of the American Action Network, the dark-money group aligned with Ryan’s political team.

NOTE: I keep telling people about how George W. Bush threw away the surplus with his tax cuts after telling Americans that any time there’s extra tax revenue, they should get it back…instead of paying down the debt. Well, here’s Lee Fang with a little more:

In 2001, while debating former President George W. Bush’s tax cut package, GOP leaders widely distributed a column by economist R. Glenn Hubbard claiming that the legislation “won’t hurt the surplus.” That prediction, of course, turned out to be laughably false.