Macroeconomic Advisers is one of the leading firms providing macroeconomic projections to private and public players alike. So it?s entertaining to read their bemused attempt to understand what, exactly, when so wrong in the modeling that the Heritage Foundation included with Paul Ryan?s budget (modeling, incidentally, that Ryan is standing by). The short answer, if you?re interested in why the numbers were wrong, appears to be ?everything,? though the other answer, if you assume that Heritage was simply looking to sell the Ryan plan atop the sunniest projections possible, appears to be that ?people were slightly less gullible than Heritage assumed.?
Anyway. There?s a larger point here, too. As MA says, ?there is a long-run gain to deficit reduction,? but it?s magical thinking to believe ?that slicing federal debt dramatically can produce long-run gain without short-run pain.? The GOP is trying to portray itself as the party of tough choices and hard truths. But the reason tough choices are tough is that they hurt. If every time you made a tough choice someone handed you a check for a million dollars and created a hundred jobs in your name, it wouldn?t be called a tough choice, would it? It?d be called an easy choice, and someone would have made it before you. So the GOP can be the party of tough choices or the party of 2.8 percent unemployment, but not both.
Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=199f54e4544131922b59feb7ee8771be
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