In looking back to the dawn of this century, the first thing we can notice is our national myopia. We survived Y2k and the “dot com” bomb in 2000, so our leaders figured it would be smooth sailing from Year 1 on.
It didn’t work out that way, starting with a flock of black swans hitting the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11 that year. It’s impossible to predict such events, but it’s still astounding that the professional economists running the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted in 2001 that we would enjoy budget surpluses as far as the eye can see, thus wiping out our entire national debt by the year 2011.
For some obscure reason, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issues 10-year projections of federal spending and revenues, when there is absolutely no factual or practical basis for forecasting growth or debts beyond a year or two. This vain…
