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.”
Trump is assuming much faster economic growth
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 […]
Economic forecasting doesn’t work. Perhaps Trump’s budget is more about goals.
Feds have been cooking books for a long time. DoD has enough “unaccounted” monies to run whole countries. Bureau of Labor Statistics cannot seem to count tens of millions of adults out of work permanently. The CPI inflation tracking is totally manipulated. These are just a few easy examples out of a long list. Trump may be adding a burner or two and turning up the flame, ofcourse.
Big Lie: “You can keep your doctor.” Barack Obama
Bigger Lie: “Affordable Care” Nancy Pelosi
Government is a lie. It promises to keep people secure. Warren vs.District of Columbia..Supreme Court rules police have no constitutional duty to provide police services to citizens. Government is there to “protect our rights” and we get warrant-less government surveillance by just about every three letter agency as well as civil asset forfeiture by various federal, state & local police. Government purports to negotiate trade deals with other nations to enable jobs and prosperity..what we get is the opposite..transnational corporate rip-off schemes like NAFTA, TTIP, TPP. We pay compulsory taxes to build and maintain infrastructure and what we get are crumbling highways and bridges, dams and antiquated air traffic control not to mention that the money goes to endless foreign wars instead…and when they run out of money for those they borrow it! Government is supposed to print and back currency, but they farm this out to private banksters who manipulate monetary policy, rob the currency of value and fleece America as well as the rest of the world with the petrodollar. I could go on and on, but if you don’t see the pattern here then there is not much else I can say. Government is violence. Government is theft. Government is deception. You can say government has the capacity to do good but this will never change the fact that every single government action good or bad is predicated on force or threat of force. If you are truly against violence then you cannot, by any proper logic, support government.
MarkR, your logic is impeccable but I would replace the word “government” with the word capitalism; especially “free trade” capitalism. We could have a socialist democracy which would be able to do the right things with our money using a “social government”, not a repressive, deceptive government of the rich over the poor slaves which we have become.