Americans are used to rolling their eyes at politicians who fail to live up to their campaign promises. So I can’t understand why Jeb Bush has announced that if he is elected president, his goal will be for American GDP to grow by 4% per year.
Almost every time a candidate or elected official publicly dangles a specific macroeconomic statistic, he regrets it. A couple of weeks before President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the chairwoman of his Council of Economic Advisers published a report called “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan,” which tried to predict the impact of the “stimulus package” that was the administration’s top priority. Among other things, the report said that the deficit-funded, $762 billion spending package would keep unemployment under 8.5%.
When the unemployment rate shot all the way up to 10%, Republicans attacked the administration for breaking its “promise.” Since then, Obama’s opponents have successfully characterized the stimulus as a failure, because even though it helped stave off another Great Depression, it objectively did not achieve its arbitrary, nice-sounding goal. Since then, any further stimulus has been politically impossible.
When they issued the controversial report, the Obama administration was facing an economic disaster and trying to pass a debt-financed rescue bill with a bigger price tag than any bill any American had ever heard of being considered before. You can hardly blame the Obama administration for trying to objectively measure what this behemoth would do for the economy.
Jeb is in no such position, so it makes no sense that he would promise the economy will reach some nice-sounding benchmark that is highly unlikely and over which, if elected president, he will have limited influence. Say in 2017, the economy grows 3.2%. This is a strong number. But Democrats could reasonably say that Bush failed to live up to his campaign promises. To voters, he’ll become yet another politician who says one thing and does another.
If politicians stopped campaigning as if they have minute control of the economy, Americans would hate them less.