MIA

Eakinomics: MIA Yesterday was the first Monday in February, the statutory deadline for the submission of the President’s Budget for Fiscal Year 2023. If you look closely, you can see it here. Oops, sorry, wrong one. It must be here. Ugh, wrong again. Let’s see, it has to be somewhere. Oh, right, it’s the digital age. Try here. You get the picture—there is no president’s budget. Should we care? It might be nice to have some idea what the administration thinks about the economic outlook. How much further will unemployment decline? Inflation is clearly not transitory, but how fast will it come down? Will wages grow faster than inflation this year? How high will interest rates go? And how fast? It might be nice to have some idea of the performance of past efforts to support the economy. What is the state of affairs on all those loans made during the pandemic? How much was spent on paid leave and paid sick days? How many people paid their student loans (something that could probably be listed by name on a single page)? What are the administration’s priorities for the next year? Will it try a stale reboot of the zombie Build Back Better agenda? Or will it pivot to something more realistic? There seems to be a lot of activity on the international agenda, with Ukraine at the forefront. How should this affect the Pentagon’s readiness and budget? One might argue that the administration cannot put out a budget without wrapping up fiscal year 2022. Fair enough, as far as the jumping off point for the budget goes. But a budget is a lot more than a set of forecasts. A budget is a statement of policy priorities and the president’s budget is the most cohesively, comprehensive, and detailed exposition of administration policy. Except that we don’t have one.