Should-Read: This is not an economist's forecast. This is...

Should-Read: This is not an economist's forecast. This is affinity fraud. Directed against Trump? Against Kudlow's Fox News viewers? Against some group of right-wing investors? In all cases, the hope is that the marks have short memories���or that something else will turn up. Paul Bedard: Larry Kudlow predicts 4%-5% growth, 'investment boom': "Larry Kudlow, picked to be President Trump���s new economic adviser...

...has privately told the White House that the nation���s economy is on the verge of 4 percent to 5 percent growth, or more than double the last decade. In a recent gathering with Trump, he said that many firms held back investing until the tax reform package passed and ���some of that is already showing up.��� What���s more, he told the president, ���We���re on the front end of the biggest investment boom in probably 30 to 40 years.��� The president responded, ���Well, I couldn���t have said it any better���...

The rule-of-thumb is that each 1% point rise in investment as a share of national product adds 0.1% point to the annual growth rate. To get from a growth rate of 2.5% up to 4.5% would thus require a 20% point jump in the investment share of national product���if you were to get it from investment.

If you were to get it from employment growth, with Okun's Law, you would need the unemployment rate to fall by 1% point per year���which means the unemployment rate would hit zero by the start of 2022. And there are no signs of a productivity growth recovery: given demography, labor productivity growth would have to consistently hit 3.75% per year in order to get to 4.5% per year real GDP growth. And that is something that the U.S. economy simply does not do:

It just does not add up.