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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It?
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To: Oral Roberts who wrote (73891)10/21/2009 12:55:19 PM
From: TimF  Read Replies (4) of 224749
 
The CBO has a specific framework about how it analyzes bills. Members of congress (or at least their staff) know these rules and can craft bills to get good scores from the CBO, even if the scores are unrealistic. Congress knows how to game the system.

The most obvious gimmick here is that the taxes are supposed to start soon, while the spending lags behind. The CBO only analyzes over a 10 year period. So you get a few years with little or no spending but with additional taxes, and it helps make things look good for the budget balance. But the reality is the spending keeps growing faster then the new taxes, so the real long term impact will be decisively negative for the budget balance.

And costs for government health care programs are typically underestimated. So even the estimates for increasing costs in the out years are probably too low.

Also the CBO can't guess about what new taxes or spending cuts are unlikely to be sustained. The bill throws in some, and the CBO dutifully counts them as real. If they go away, well the bill already passed, partially based on the CBO scoring...

And of course the budget balance isn't everything, even if it did reduce the deficit, the new taxes and spending, and mandates would still be a serious cost to the economy.
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