Report: Trump Transition Ordered Government Economists to Cook Up Rosy Growth Forecasts

Mathew Yglesias:

Report: Trump transition ordered government economists to cook up rosy growth forecasts: 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.” ...