They are all full of baloney, aren't they?

Megan McArdle:

"Indeed, though Obama is getting a lot of credit for projecting out ten years, I'm not sure I see the point from an economic, rather than a political, perspective. These models consist of the modellers assuming that most things will continue to be largely as they are, unless the economy is in a recession, in which case everything will return to 3% trend growth 18 months after the recession started. They don't track reality all that much better than you would by throwing darts at a board with a bounded range of GDP growth around a mean of 3%. Given that we are in most unual times, they are particularly suspect now."