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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.😱😁
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!
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.
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.
Of course. Who would anyone think otherwise. Seems a challenge for some on HD to recognize a joke. 🤪
Humor often doesn’t come over as intended online. It’s a literal medium and irony is frequently overlooked or misunderstood. Emojis notwithstanding.