This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 29th, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

The White House Budget Office has revised its forecast for future growth downward and how much of these estimates even matter.

For long-term forecasts of entitlement programs,

a growth estimate's reliable or even useful.

Dragadich Goklay, a senior fellow of the Cato Institute

and author of the book Social Security a fresh

look at policy alternatives comments.

Well I think neither the CBO nor OMB would say that their estimates are bad. In general I think both of them have fairly capable staff of making projections and they have a good command over the data that goes into making these estimates and they have their differences of opinion.

The only difference, one important difference between the OMB budget projections is that they are post policy projections, meaning they

incorporate the proposed policies of the president. And because of that, there

may be some issue about how those policies would affect growth

going forward so they may build in some policy impact of growth and since

policies generally would be designed to improve growth.

Maybe that explains part of why OMB estimates on economic growth and other economic assumptions are somewhat more, tend to be somewhat more optimistic

than the CPS, but I would say it's difficult to pin down the exact reasons for

why the estimates differ.

Growth matters for so many different reasons.

On the area of entitlement programs, what does a growth estimate? In the

models that people have,

the models that people have for various entitlement programs,

you would think, okay, well, growth is lower, maybe

employment numbers aren't quite what they ought to be, there's less

...