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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (41930)	3/11/2010 1:12:38 PM
From: Peter Dierks	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

The CBO said in the notes that the numbers relied on HIGHLY UNLIKELY promises for future cuts. Of course if you know better than the CBO feel free to enlighten us.

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (41930)	3/11/2010 1:13:38 PM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Reconciliation: The Hypocritical Path for the Passage of the $2.5 Trillion Health Care Bill By BPeck on Mar 03, 2010 If the Democratic lawmakers in this video use reconciliation to gain passage of the currently pending health care bill, then it becomes clear that these same Democratic lawmakers are hypocrites in their own right. In this video, Democratic lawmakers claim that reconciliation is an irreponsibile power grab. Well if reconciliation is an irresponsible power grab, then why are these same Democratic lawmakers who denounced reconciliation deliberately choosing to use it? See the video here: freedomworks.org

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (41930)	3/11/2010 4:08:57 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. An statement isn't correct or incorrect because of the person making it. Suggesting it is is ad-hominem. And what the CBO did, while non-partisan (and in fact legally required of them) is lousy analysis, with a methodology that obviously doesn't fit this bill. The bill includes 6 years of spending set off by 10 years of taxes. Not hard to show a 10 year reduction in the deficit when you do it that way. But it will increase the deficit in any particular year except the first four.

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (41930)	3/17/2010 10:05:47 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 71588

A Confession from the CBO Director Posted by Daniel J. Mitchell The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the so-called stimulus generated jobs and growth. I addressed some of the profound shortcomings in CBO’s Keynesian model in a previous post, pointing out that the model is structured to produce certain results regardless of what happens in the real world. Interestingly, the Director of the CBO, Doug Elmendorf, basically agrees with me. In a recent speech, recorded by C-SPAN, he was asked during the question-and-answer session whether the model simply spits out pre-determined numbers. After some hemming and hawing and a follow-up question, he confessed “that’s right” when asked if the model would be unable to detect whether the stimulus failed. The relevant exchange begins around the he 39-minute mark of this recording, and Elmendorf’s confession takes place shortly after the 40-minute mark (I selflessly watched the entire thing so you wouldn’t have to suffer waiting for the key moment). I’m not sure whether this admission is good news or bad news. It is a sign of progress, I suppose, that CBO’s Director is now on the record acknowledging that the model is useless (at least for purposes of measuring the effectiveness of more government spending). But it is perhaps an even more troubling indication of what’s wrong in Washington that nobody is concluding that the time has come to junk Keynesian analysis. This is either an updated version of The Emperor’s New Clothes or a perverse form of the joke about the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight because there’s light, even though he lost them someplace else. cato-at-liberty.org