Hyperbole poisons everything in Washington. Phrases like “multi-trillion-dollar savings” and “billions in social returns” prevent anyone from soberly assessing the proposals that whiz around Capitol Hill and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Yet such deluded thinking isn’t just confined to Washington. It’s also widespread outside of the nation’s capital.
In states and municipalities across the country, officials greenlight massive taxpayer-funded undertakings based on shoddy consultant reports that wouldn’t pass muster in an introductory economics course. Underlying these reckless projects are consultancies that are paid hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to write reports that systematically overstate the benefits—and downplay the costs—of the proposals they are analyzing....