Team Trump ordered faked-up rosy economic forecasts
This is how a republic is undermined: have the underlings cook up lies. lies, lies.
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As the White House staff tries to put together a budget for President Donald Trump, they face a fundamental problem. Trump has promised to cut taxes, increase spending on the military and infrastructure, and avoid cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The only way to do that without producing an exploding budget deficit is to assume a big increase in economic growth.
And Nick Timiraos at the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is planning to do just that — by making things up.
Deep into his story about Trump budget hijinks, Timiraos reveals that “what’s unusual about the administration’s forecasts isn’t just their relative optimism but also the process by which they were derived.” Specifically, what’s unusual about them is that they weren’t derived by any process at all. Instead of letting economists build a forecast, Trump’s budget was put together with “transition officials telling the CEA staff the growth targets that their budget would produce and asking them to backfill other estimates off those figures.”
Staff has been ordered to project that inflation-adjusted growth will average between 3 and 3.5 percent over the next decade, eventually settling at around 3.2 percent.
That’s drastically higher than the estimates provided by the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve, both of which see the economy growing at a bit less than 2 percent. The make-believe reasoning the administration is giving for this is that “a regulatory rollback and a tax-code revamp will unleash growth that drives a recovery in productivity, sends business investment higher and draws idled workers back to the labor force.”
It’s a variation on the ol’ “trickle down” scam. We’ve cut taxes on the rich again and again and again and again and again.
Has it ever stimulated the economy or benefitted working families? (Is that crickets I hear?)
‘Nuff said.
You can see the WSJ story here.
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