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I'm always skeptical when politicians start using economic statistics. Chiefly, this is because I don't believe they understand them. I don't mean that they don't understand them as in they don't know the precise definition of, say, GDP vs. GNP, but that they profoundly misunderstand what they are. To wit: economic statistics are an attempt to measure a latent, unobservable, platonic ideal. They are not themselves truth, but an attempt at measuring truth. So GDP is an estimate of the size of the economy, it is not itself the size of the economy.
Now great number of intelligent people spend a great deal of time constructing the best statistical definitions they can, ensuring that they are as consistent as possible over time in a changing world, and measuring the inputs as accurately as possible. This task is fundamentally incompatible with politics. Politics does not depend on getting the best measure but on getting the "right" measure. Right being whichever estimate best helps one's constituency.
A recent attempt to base politics on economic statistics is the current fetishization of "manufacturing." But what is manufacturing? I manufactured this blog post. You can print it out and manufacture a letter. Are the economic statistics themselves the output of economists who manufacture them? When you write laws around statistics, you quickly find that the statistics change to fit the laws. This is not good science. A good video (courtesy Greg Mankiw) makes the point by considering the question: Are hamburgers manufacturing?
(As an aside, I also think laws tying the budget to a measure of GDP are flawed for the same reason.)
