Curiously Specific

I saw a television ad this morning that claimed “fixing America’s broken immigration system” will cause the economy to grow at 5.4% a year.

I’m reminded of Paul Krugman’s old discussion of NAFTA’s likely effect on the economy–skewering both the doom-predicting opponents and the irrationally exuberant supporters–which ran something like this (paraphrased from memory):

Want to know what the growth rate will be when NAFTA passes? It will be just what the Fed wants it to be, plus or minus a few percentage points to account for the fact that Alan Greenspan is not (quite) God.

A damn good bit of wisdom there from Mr. K.