Trump has started cooking the books of the US economy... in a stupid way.

[DetlefK]

https://thinkprogress.org/trump-cook-economic-data-8086a7a6b6cd#.r4lixd5w3

President Trump won the White House talking about the ills of the economy and how he would fix them. But to fix what’s broken, first you need to measure where things stand. So far, it appears that the Trump administration is manipulating official data to paint the picture it wants, rather than the way things actually are.

All presidents release their own economic growth forecasts as part of the budget process. That process is currently underway in the Trump administration, and the forecasts are expected to be released in the coming weeks.

Many presidents seek to make the numbers look as positive as possible. But according to sources who spoke with the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the Trump administration is going much further. It told White House economic advisers to start with a GDP growth target of between 3 and 3.5 percent a year for the next decade and then backfill numbers in their models to make that prediction work.

...

But the Trump team is calling for 3–3.5 percent annual GDP growth. That’s at least a whole percentage point above the consensus projection. The economy has grown about 2 percent a year, on average, for the last decade, and the Federal Reserve and Congressional Budget Office both forecast growth of under 2 percent over the long term.

...

The Journal also reports that the administration has asked career economists to make a change in the way the trade deficit is calculated. The new method means no longer counting as exports anything that’s imported to the country and then sold to another country.



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Let's see. He promises to deliver a 3.5% increase. While experts predict that the increase will be no more than 2%.

Is it just me, or is it a stupid idea to make outlandish promises you can in no way fulfill?

If the official projection is 2%, how about promising 2.2% and then trying to get at least 2.3%, so you can brag that you exceeded all expectations?

[Progressive dog]

1. The people holding government securities or corporate debt

will not allow the books to be cooked. Trump is just trying to run the government like he runs his businesses. Putin doesn't have the money to bail our government out.