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February 10, 2004

Bush's Ridiculous Job Growth Projections

Along with budget made up of lies, missing budget lines and deceptive statistics, Bush is also projecting job growth numbers for the coming year that Brad Delong carefully details as being completely insane. This post is a summary of a number of posts Brad has done explaining why the numbers are so crazy, but the bottom-line is that the administration is projecting 3.8 million new jobs created in the coming year.

This is preposterous, so why are they putting out such a bad number. Cue Brad:

Why are Greg Mankiw and company sacrificing their analytic credibility by issuing an absurdly highballed employment growth forecast? Because if they didn't, then the 2004 number for the payroll employment column in Table C-1, page 98 would be equal to or lower than payroll employment when George W. Bush took office.

So somebody in the White House decided that Table C-1, page 98 could not contain a number that would allow reporters to write, "Bush administration expects 2004 payrolls to be below level at inauguration.

As of late yesterday afternoon, Greg Mankiw was not taking reporters' phone calls about the employment "projections," and not responding to reporters' questions.

ie. It's all politics. Every intelligence estimate, every budget number, every economic statistic put out by this administration has been bastardized. Who knows what the honest statisticians in the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other departments think-- they are obviously either being forced to doctor the numbers, or the political department is just redoing them in the dark of night and then inserted into publicly released documents.

Under Reagan, folks complained about "rosy scenarios" where the budget office always picked the most optimistic estimates. That's not what's happening in the Bush administration, since even optimists can't buy these numbers. These are psychedelic scenarios, hallucinogenic tabs to distract the population from Bush's miserable failure on economic policy.

Posted by Nathan at February 10, 2004 09:04 PM

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