Washington's no better than a stopped clock, thus it has to work twice as hard to be right even twice a day...

Andrew Sullivan (still on my nerves, though he has dialed it down a bit) went to those ultra-fair bastions of Journalistic integrity at the Murdoch Street Journal, and dug out this little nugget of information:

Mr. Obama's budget also assumes annual economic growth of more than 4% from 2012-2014. That's far more robust than anything this recovery has produced so far, and it is at least a percentage point higher than most private economists or the Congressional Budget Office predict.

Andrew, like all Debt-fetishists would, freaked.

And once again, we turn to Jonathan Chait to put that notion in its place:

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is criticizing the Obama administration's budget for, among other things, using economic estimates from the Office of management and Budget that are more optimistic than those put forth by the Congressional Budget Office. Andrew Sullivan calls this "mendacity and delusion." What's interesting here is that this question, esoteric as it may sound, was the flashpoint of the Clinton-Gingrich budget showdown.

Republicans insisted that any budget agreement use CBO's more pessimistic projections, which Republicans called "real numbers." Indeed, hard as it may be to understand now, the GOP demand that both sides attain a balanced budget based on "real numbers" was a major impetus for the government shutdown.

...

So, which prediction turned out to be correct? Well, the CBO's prediction of 2.3% annual growth through 2002 turned out to be too pessimistic. OMB's prediction of 2.5% growth turned out to be... too pessimistic. The actual result was 3.5% growth. The deficit disappeared with much less fiscal pain than anybody predicted would be needed.