The following article by Bryce Covert was posted on the ThinkProgress site February 21, 2017:
Rather than fix the problems the economy has, the administration is trying to get the numbers it wants.
President Trump won the White House talking about the ills of the economy and how he would fix them. But to fix what’s broken, first you need to measure where things stand. So far, it appears that the Trump administration is manipulating official data to paint the picture it wants, rather than the way things actually are.
All presidents release their own economic growth forecasts as part of the budget process. That process is currently underway in the Trump administration, and the forecasts are expected to be released in the coming weeks.
Many presidents seek to make the numbers look as positive as possible. But according to sources who spoke with the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the Trump administration is going much further. It told White House economic advisers to start with a GDP growth target of between 3 and 3.5 percent a year for the next decade and then backfill numbers in their models to make that prediction work. Continue reading “Trump is cooking the books of the American economy”