Incidentally, that’s the same C.B.O. that the O.M.B. director said last month should be dissolved.

In related news, during a Senate hearing on Thursday, Fed chair Janet Yellen was asked by Senator Bob Corker if she thought the administration’s claim it will achieve 3 percent economic growth through a combination of tax reform, deregulation, and infrastructure spending was realistic. Her answer was a delightful example of grandmotherly bemusement and playing along to be nice that we assume she uses with first graders who visit the Federal Reserve and tell her they’ve got a plan to turn the $10 they got for their birthdays into $10 million dollars in short order.

“It’s something that would be wonderful if you can accomplish it—I’d love to see it,” she told Corker. “It would be quite challenging.”

Yellen, of course, joins a long line of people who think the White House’s 3-percent-a-year prediction is a fantasy, apparently having been unmoved by Mulvaney’s Wednesday op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he laid out the administration’s plan for achieving what he called, wait for it, “MAGAnomics.”

Fed chair: rolling back financial regulations wouldn’t be that great an idea

During her testimony, Yellen also clarified a statement she made two weeks ago in London, when she said that there probably wouldn’t be another financial crisis in “our lifetime.” That statement, she noted, was dependent on keeping the rules put in place in the wake of the last crisis, lest anyone in the Trump administration think it’s totally fine to start hacking away at them without repercussions. “What I should have stated originally when I made that comment, I believe we have done a great deal since the financial crisis to strengthen the system and to make it more resilient,” Yellen told Senator Sherrod Brown. “It’s important that we maintain the improvements that have been put in place that mitigate the risk and the potential damage.”

Team Trump is keen to get rid many of the Obama-era restrictions put in place in the wake of the financial crisis in order to prevent another one. Last month, the Treasury released a 150-page report calling for loosening or scrapping more than 100 financial rules.

Area man still clinging to dream of tax reform getting done this year

Despite the fact that the Trump administration, which promised to repeal and replace Obamacare on “day one,” has been unable to repeal or replace the Affordable Care Act, or pass any meaningful legislation whatsoever, or go one single day without distracting bad press like Trump’s son lying about his meetings with Russians or Trump’s lawyer sending a series of unhinged e-mails to a stranger, one analyst is still holding onto the dream like a kid who insists his parents really are going to get back together one day.

“We think taxes are different than health care. We think there are lessons learned from health care. It's not easy,” policy research strategist Daniel Clifton told CNBC. “The Russia story has made it harder to do, but we're confident the fourth quarter is going to be very focused on tax reform, with completion in the first quarter. There’s a lot of progress being made on tax reform, and it's all being done behind the scenes. They're trying to work out the thornier issues of tax reform so they avoid the problems they're having on health care.”

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