Writing for the latest National Review, Kevin A. Hassett of the American Enteprrise Institute compares the gap between presidential budget assumptions and those of the “nonpartisan” Congressional Budget Office (Hassett’s quotation marks). Hassett finds an interesting difference between President Obama and his most recent predecessors.
[M]ost of the presidents, on average, assumed slightly more positive outcomes than the CBO, perhaps because of the desire to understate deficits. President Obama’s budgets, however, differed from the CBO’s projections in a much more dramatic way than those of any of the previous four presidents, and especially those of his two immediate predecessors.
President Obama’s predictions have not proved especially accurate over the past three years either: In 2010, his economic team projected growth this year to reach 4.6 percent; instead, it has been slogging along in the twos. Even when it became clearer in 2010 and 2011 that the recovery from the recession could drag on, his assumptions continued to call for high growth in the near future. When one considers the myriad ways the mainstream media have failed to critically inspect the activities of this president, his economic forecasts take the cake. Obama and his economic team have consistently overstated growth in an attempt to misrepresent the massive deficits their policies will produce. While pitching the propaganda that they will stabilize the debt, they have posted growth forecasts that are shockingly out of sync with the CBO.
