t's see what else. According to Just the News, Ben Whedon is writing that the Treasury has announced that in June the government will have a $27 billion surplus from tariff revenues. Surplus meaning that after the government paid all of its bills it would have an extra $27 billion left over. And that happens to be the amount that came in from tariffs. Does that sound real? Doesn't that sound a little bit too impossible? Did we just go from deficits that could never be solved to, oh looks like in June we spent less than we made?

So I went to Grok and said, is this true? Is it possible that even for one month of the year that we would take in more revenue as a country than we spend? And Grok said yes. But it also said that in May we spent $316 billion more than we made. So is that a thing? Can the month of May be spending over 300 billion more than you have and yet by June you're making 27 billion more than you spend? Is it possible that the way budgets work in the government is that they do most of their spending in a few months so they don't necessarily smooth it out? Is that what's going on? There's something about this story that doesn't seem like it could possibly be real. Does it? Do you think it's real that the government took in more revenue than it has spent even in one month? Any one month? I don't know. I'm going to put a pin in this one and say I don't believe it. Don't believe it.

Well Peter Navarro wrote an article for Fox News, an opinion piece, and he's talking about the CBO and how their estimates were failures. Now the CBO is the entity that tells the public if Congress does this or that this will be what happens with the deficit and GDP and all that. So if you have a plan to do something for the country you want the CBO to say that's a good plan because that's supposedly the independent nonpartisan analysis. However, what if I told you about complicated 10-year projections of anything? Could be something about the budget with lots of variables and lots of people and years and assumptions or it could be something about the climate. What do I say about all of those situations? There's no human being who can predict any of that. Those are not predictable things.

But Peter Navarro points out some specific things that the CBO does wrong. And in there there's a lesson. And so I wanted to share that with you. So one of the things that they don't do, well I guess they frontload spending. So they act like the spending happens right away which would push up maybe your inflation and your interest rates and then bad things would happen. And they also don't calculate the benefit of economic growth that might be the whole point of your spending bill. So Trump's spending bill, whatever you want to call it, the latest one is designed to give money back to taxpayers which presumably they would spend which would be good for the GDP and a bunch of other stuff which should goose the economy. But when the CBO does their analysis they do not assume that the GDP goes up more than it normally would historically.

So long story short, whoever is ever in charge of these big complicated estimates of what's going to happen in the future, the result is always based on their assumptions. It's not really based on some kind of factual thing. We like to think it is. It's not based on facts and it's not based on math. It's based on the assumptions. So if the people who do the analysis make an assumption that's friendly to the Trump administration it might look like we made money by cutting taxes, but you could very easily make different assumptions and make it look like it's a huge economic disaster. So Peter Navarro does a good job of simply pointing out that these are assumption-based estimates and not necessarily some kind of fact that you should trust. And he is quite confident that the latest moves by the administration will be good for the economy and reduce the deficit if the CBO were good at doing estimates.

Well The Post Millennial is talking about how there's a Gallup