I never watched That ’70s Show, but according to Wikipedia, the comedy program “addressed social issues of the 1970s.”
Assuming that’s true, they need a sequel that addresses economic issues of the 1970s. And the star of the program could be the Congressional Budget Office, a Capitol Hill bureaucracy that apparently still believes — notwithstanding all the evidence of recent decades —
in the primitive Keynesian view that a larger burden of government spending is somehow good for economic growth and job creation.
I’ve previously written about CBO’s fairy-tale views on fiscal policy, but wondered whether a new GOP-appointed director would make a difference. And I thought there were signs of progress in CBO’s recent analysis of the economic impact of Obamacare.
But the bureaucracy just released its estimates of what would happen if the spending caps in the Budget Control Act (BCA) were eviscerated to enable more federal spending. And CBO’s analysis was such a throwback to the 1970s that it should have been released by a guy in a leisure suit driving a Ford Pinto blaring disco music.