Larry Summers Dislikes Comparisons Of Romney's Imaginary Budget With An Imaginary Obama Budget

This op-ed pits one prominent economist against another prominent economist.  Glenn Hubbard is one of the prominent economists on Romney's team.  He followed the other prominent economist on Romney's team, N. Gregory Mankiw, in using the WSJ editorial page to make the economic case for their client.

Larry Summers, who was an adviser to Obama, argues that budgets should contain numbers.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is an independent agency that uses numbers to score budget proposals by government.  The CBO analysis of the Obama budget proposal uses the numbers to score the budget and concludes that it puts the budget on a sustainable long term path.  Hubbard ignores the CBO analysis of the Obama budget and imputes numbers to the budget that are based upon his own assumptions.  He also makes assumptions about numbers, that are not provided in the Romney budget, to conclude that the imaginary Romney budget is superior to the imaginary Obama budget.

Larry Summers is only one of many economists who have made a similar case against Hubbard's preference for imaginary budgets.  Most economists like numbers.  Someone once said that economists are persons who are good with numbers, but who do not have enough personality to become an economist.  Hubbard and Mankiw are both very good with numbers.  Unfortunately, they prefer imaginary numbers when they put on their Team GOP uniforms.