The big macroeconomic risk is that the cuts cause a return to recession, thereby wrecking the government's fiscal calculations.
The back-and-forth over money matters came as a New York Times/CBS News poll showed that most voters are thinking less about candidates' detailed fiscal calculations than about how nice they seem.
But the fire occurred in Sacramento, the budget-challenged capital of budget-challenged California, where city officials have been forced at times to test the boundaries of a particular factor in their fiscal calculations: risk.
With the massive cost-cutting in education, health and human services and other essential areas going on in state capitols, Washington may have a difficult time convincing many of those lawmakers that they should factor high-speed rail into their long-term fiscal calculations.
Each of the bills reflects delicate political and fiscal calculations as Republican leaders seek to deliver on President Trump's campaign promises to cut taxes on the middle class and on businesses — but also find the money to pay for them.
A researcher whose fiscal calculations have provided crucial support in the past for conservative opponents of an immigration overhaul released a report on Monday, predicting that a proposal now in the Senate would vastly increase the government deficit in coming decades.
Politicians in some other ailing euro economies are watching the latest upheaval in Lisbon closely, aware that they, too, might soon be forced to revise their fiscal calculations, as their country's financing problems grind on, their economies remain in recession and their own courts review some of their recent economic measures.
According to the calculations of fiscal watchdog groups, Mr. Obama has indeed requested that amount of funding since entering the Senate in 2005.
For example, the housing market collapse that left millions of US homeowners underwater is not part of textbook models, but it made precise calculations of fiscal stimulus based on them impossible.
Early on in the crisis I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations for fiscal expansion and guesstimated that a coordinated expansion had twice the bang per euro of a unilateral expansion by just one euro area economy.
