Charlie Colgan isn’t to blame for all the mistakes made by … uh … Charlie Colgan.
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Colgan is a former state economist (a job for which there appears to be no penalty for compiling a record of being thoroughly wrong) and is now an economics professor at the University of Southern Maine (an institution facing a severe financial crisis that nobody saw coming) and chairman of the Consensus Economic Forecasting Commission (the august body that periodically provides state officials with erroneous reports on economic trends, which are used to craft faulty forecasts of future state revenues, which become the basis for overly optimistic state budgets that have to be constantly revised downward).
But none of that turns out to be Colgan’s fault.
He and his fellow forecasting commissioners can’t be expected to get things right when they’re being fed questionable statistics about Maine’s employment levels by the federal government.
“We’ve never been in this situation in the 18 years I’ve been doing this, where the most basic numbers are so unreliable,” Colgan is quoted as saying in the August 29 Maine Sunday Telegram.
Added state economist Michael LeVert, a member of Colgan’s commission, in the same article, “We’ve lost faith in the numbers.”
As someone who lost faith in the numbers a long time ago, I know just how distressed LeVert must feel. For instance, I recall how upset I was when the predictions Colgan made in late 2008 about the length and severity of what was then a newly arrived recession proved to be about as accurate as the North Korean wheat-harvest forecast.
In December ’08, he told the Bangor Daily News that the economic downturn wouldn’t be nearly as bad as the one the state experienced in 1990-91, when Maine lost 23,000 jobs.
To date, the state is down 30,000 jobs. Or maybe 35,000, depending on what figure Colgan is using on any given day.
In the Portland Press Herald that same month, Colgan predicted an uptick in consumer confidence in the spring of 2009, with the credit market righting itself by early 2010.
Still waiting.
In January 2009, Mainebiz quoted him as saying, “I don’t see much of a turnaround in 2009, but the worst will be over by the end of 2009.”
Pay your mortgage with that.
In June 2009, he told the Press Herald, that it was now “the best time in years” to start a retail business.
No annoying customers, so you’d save the time and effort that would otherwise have to be devoted to waiting on them.
In November 2009, Colgan admitted to a legislative committee that he’d been a bit too bullish in his earlier estimates of the recession’s severity. But he said he wouldn’t be making that mistake again.
“The good news is,” he said, “the worst of it is over.”
The bad news is it was Colgan saying that.
As the economic malaise lingered into 2010, many experts, such as University of Maine vice chancellor Jim Breece (a member of Colgan’s commission), revised their guesses and began predicting it could take four or five years for the state’s economy to return to pre-recession levels.
Here’s Colgan’s opinion, as told to the Capitol News Service in January: “We don’t think that the economy fell as much in 2009 as we previously thought, and we think the economy may grow a tad faster in 2010 than we previously thought.”
Throughout this year, Colgan has continued to make delusional happy noises. In May, he told Capitol News, “The data that we can look at on a month-to-month basis has been pretty consistent in showing an upward trend, but also pretty consistent in showing a slow recovery to pre-recession levels.”
That would happen in late 2012, he predicted.
A few days later in the Press Herald, he moved the date to early 2013.
In August, the same paper quoted him as hedging his bets. It might be a little later than that, he said.
Late last year, the feds revised the way they gather the economic data on which Colgan and company rely for their forecasts. All of a sudden, Colgan – who, as noted four paragraphs ago, had been referring to those figures as “pretty consistent” – started claiming they were too volatile and unreliable to construct accurate economic forecasts.
Not that his use of the old methodology had produced a lot of accurate economic forecasts.
Nevertheless, I’m willing to give Colgan the benefit of the doubt, because when it comes to federal figures, the fudge factor frequently fouls up the facts. Or as Indiana University Professor Eric Leeper told Federal Reserve officials last week (according to a story in the McClatchy Newspapers), U.S. fiscal policy is “politically confused and paralyzed.”
Colgan may be inept, inaccurate and insufficiently forthcoming about his shortcomings, but it would be unfair to blame him for statistical errors churned out by inept, inaccurate and insufficiently forthcoming feds.
From now on, it’s not his fault if he continues to be consistently wrong.
Economic forecasts and other hogwash can be e-mailed to aldiamon@herniahill.net, where they’ll be properly disposed of.
