How was the bar lowered for Turkey's national income goals?

Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Şimşek's recent tweet on the size of Turkey's economy blatantly "trolls" those who are closest to him. Following his tweet, which referred to the country's purchasing power parity (PPP), Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım joined the chorus of those proclaiming that "we have attained our 2023 goals."

"[We are] the fifth largest economy in Europe according to the IMF. We have passed Spain in terms of PPP. [Turkey is] the third [largest economy] in the Mediterranean and the largest in the Middle East. Gross national product [GNP] has exceeded $2 trillion. That was one of our four goals for 2023," Yıldırım said after his recent visit to Vietnam. 

"We have reached $25,000 in national income [per capita]. That was our second goal. Now we have the goals of $500 billion in annual exports and becoming one of the top 10 world economies ahead of us. We have six more years. We will work hard to achieve both of those goals," he added.

This not a joke. Prime Minister Yıldırım is claiming that Turkey has achieved the government's 2023 objectives. Days have passed since he made this statement but it has still not yet been corrected. In reality, we are a long way from the 2023 goals as originally set. Indeed, we would barely have reached halfway toward these goals if it had not been for the revisions made to economic calculations at the end of 2016.

Whenever Turkey slips in national income numbers, the government moves its revisions to an earlier date. If that is not enough, it has quietly stopped calculating gross national income, instead opting for PPP, which is a much higher number and more attractive for citizens who don't know the difference between nominal and PPP values. Now, by lowering the bar the government is...