The Hanover Collaboration

Comments:

• danimal
  Apr 27, 08:52 PM

  I don’t know which trends specifically the OMB has extrapolated out to make this chart, but it’s absurd on the very face of it.

  Those predictions must be incredibly sensitive to assumptions about GDP growth. And how were they able to tell there won’t be any changes in taxes as a portion of GDP between 2015 and 2070? That’s never been true for any 55 year period before.

  It’s an interesting way to make a point, but no one thinks the OMB has figured out what discretionary spending is going to be in 2050! Recently they’ve had trouble predicting receipts and expenditures even 1 year in advance.

• Jon Shea
  Apr 27, 08:58 PM

  Fair enough. I’d believe that people can come up with fairly good numbers for “Mandatory spending”, though.

• danimal
  Apr 28, 06:47 PM

  It may depend on our standard for “fairly good numbers of mandatory spending.”

  By mandatory spending, they mean medicare and social security. So this requires they can predict demographic trends including life expectancy, immigration patterns and birth rates, as well as trends in medical costs, etc.

  And since they report this as a fraction of GDP, even if they got all that right, it wouldn’t mean they can predict the fraction that they report.

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