The standard joke I always heard (I'm an economist) was: If you take all the economists in the world and laid them end-to-end, they'd never reach a conclusion.
The problem is that economists try to forecast human behavior and that's imprecise, at best. What really bothers me right now, however, are the idiots on TV and in print who say: "If you're concerned about the deficit, how can you even think about a tax cut?" This shows incredible stupidity. Just look at what happened to gov't tax receipts after the Kennedy and Reagan tax cuts. Those people should also take a look at the empirical evidence associated with the Laffer curve.
John Williams (Shadow Government Statistics) convincingly argues that the government cooks the numbers to the point where they are almost meaningless (e.g. deletes food and energy costs from the CPI used to index Social Security payments -- but diligently includes housing costs sans property taxes and vacation expenses). He also maintains inflation is currently running at a 5 to 10 percent rate (retail vs. wholesale prices).
Many other economists now predict that inflation will break hard. The consensus estimate on timing seems to be sometime during the second half of 2011 to the first half of 2012, although some believe we could be paying for our sins as early as the 4th quarter of this year.
As an economist, what say you?