Tuesday, January 31, 2012

 

New CBO Data Graph

Huge Deficits as Far as the Eye Can See. (h/t Jimmy P)

I like that it's in percentage of GDP. You get a better picture of how bad the spending was during Reagan and Bush (father) and what good things the '94 House Republicans did. Notice too that the thing heads seriously south when the Democrats take over Congress in January, 2007

Oh, and the Alternative Fiscal Scenario is the more likely prediction, even if it's a bit rosy still.

UPDATE: Here's a piece at Powerline which explains why even the terrible projections of the CBO are not based in reality, Money quote:

In particular, the baseline outlook assumes the expiration of three policies that will not happen. First, it assumes that the tax cuts put in place in 2001 and 2003 will expire, raising taxes sharply at the end of this calendar year—a proposal not even President Obama supports. Second, the baseline assumes that the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will begin to snare more and more taxpayers, even though the AMT has been patched annually to hold taxpayers harmless for more than a decade. Third, the baseline assumes that Medicare’s payment rates for physicians will decrease by 27 percent on March 1, 2012, despite the fact that Congress has repeatedly prevented the payment reduction. While those assumptions are not tenable, they do improve CBO’s baseline deficit outlook by $4.9 trillion over the projection period—overstating tax receipts by $4.6 trillion and understating Medicare spending by $326 billion.

Labels:


Comments:
I've quit believing USG numbers. For example, there was today's MSM rejoicing about the lower unemployment rate when it was primarily obtained by subtracting 1.2 MILLION workers from the labor force. 1.2M in one month. Saw that one at Zero Hedge this morning.

Also, see Arnold Kling, here at EconLog. He has some "concerns" about CBO:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/concerns_with_t.html#comments

No $hit, Arnie, you SHOULD have "concerns" that they gamed the CBO score of Obamacare. At the time, folks were screaming that from the rooftops, but were ignored.

And a recent article in WSJ noted that recent months' crop estimates by the Dept. of Agri. have been all over the map 'cuz they can't get their numbers right.

You can't make good decisions with bogus numbers. And that's what we've been getting from the guvmint.
 
See also, here:
http://www.shadowstats.com/
 
I feel the same way about some of the data about world average and mean temperature. Whom to trust?
 
Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?