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The spreadsheet conundrum when the stakes are high.

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AUTHOR: R Quinn on 8/11/2025

The Congressional Budget Office (OMB), the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) all use quite sophisticated forms of a spreadsheet and they all come up with different projections for debt, deficits, GDP and inflation, etc. … because they use different assumptions. 

See, I told you so, those darn spreadsheets will find any answer you like.😱😁

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B Carr
2 months ago

My father was a business professor whose specialty was accounting. He refused to ever use a computer and required his students to buy a Boorum & Pease “Columnar Pad”, 17″ x 14″. These were the paper spreadsheets of the day. I retained two of them from his estate.

Perish the thought that I would ever use one!

Nick Politakis
2 months ago

When I was in public accounting I loved excel spreadsheets and how one small change would make the numbers what I wanted them to be. Granted I was not working on projections of our deficit, debt, GDP or inflation but it gave me the power to do what I wanted.

Rick Connor
2 months ago

Neither MS Excel nor MS Word make assumptions. People make assumptions. Doesn’t matter if you use a spreadsheet, Fortran, C++, or a yellow legal pad and pencil. You can even make assumptions in a comment to another’s post. There is no difference.

You can’t make any predictions about the future without assumptions. That means you always have to evaluate the assumptions you make and do the best you can.

Mike Gaynes
2 months ago
Reply to  R Quinn

Humor often doesn’t come over as intended online. It’s a literal medium and irony is frequently overlooked or misunderstood. Emojis notwithstanding.

DAN SMITH
2 months ago
Reply to  R Quinn

I got it Dick.

bbbobbins
2 months ago

I think your scorn for such things relates to a fundamental lack of numeracy and/or confidence in using numbers. A spreadsheet is neither good nor bad – it is simply a tool for recording and manipulating data.

Anyone vaguely competent using one in the field of personal finance appreciates the limitations which obviously relate to the input variables. The fact that you don’t get a single unambiguous answer from spreadsheet models is a feature not a bug – it helps us identify factors which have the greatest impact/sensitivity and derive ranges of possible outcomes from reasonable ranges of assumptions.

Rick Connor
2 months ago
Reply to  bbbobbins

This is exactly right, especially the 2nd part. Understanding the sensitivity to different variables is key to good analytics, in any field.

Jonathan Clements
Admin
2 months ago

Dick, you keep harping on the same themes: your distaste for spreadsheets, your fondness for guaranteed retirement income, your scorn for the FIRE movement, how you think present value calculations are meaningless, etc. I — and I suspect other readers — would love you to give these topics a rest and instead pontificate on other subjects. I miss the Dick Quinn who used to write amusing posts with observations from the coffee shop and the grocery store.

Mark Crothers
2 months ago

I think you just love a good lively debate πŸ˜‚

Winston Smith
2 months ago

More fiction has been written in Excel than in Word.

  • Morgan Housel 
DAN SMITH
2 months ago

Troublemaker!😁

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