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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (16278)	4/7/2010 8:41:18 AM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Respond to of 42652

If the CBO always get it's projections wrong, and I assume seriously wrong, why are they still in business and used by both parties...? They are apolitical, aren't they?? If not the CBO, who? It's not CBO's fault. No one could do it better. It's a matter of accepting their output for what it is rather than ignorantly elevating it to absolute truth status.

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (16278)	4/7/2010 12:04:00 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Lane pretty much handled my response. More indirectly see Message 26441895 In addition to the general problems of making such predictions, the CBO labors under the additional problem of having certain restrictions on its analysis. These restrictions actually make some sense, if you have the CBO determine which changes a law calls for will actually happen, its role become more political. If you use dynamic analysis then the assumptions for the analysis become political football. But if you use static analysis and assume anything congress says in the law will really happen you can get some wildly inaccurate results. There there is another problem, Goodhart's Law - See lesswrong.com (or if you have any problems with the site go to Message 26397886 ) What we care about is the actual cost of the program, and the actual deficit impact, etc. What we have is the CBO estimate. The more weight placed on CBO estimates the more likely they are to be manipulated. Since we have come to place a lot of weight on them there is a lot of incentive to manipulate the estimate. Members of congress can't directly manipulate the estimate, but they can set up their laws so as to get a lower score for spending or deficits, without necessarily actually being low in either. If the CBO doesn't comply, they can run as many alternatives as they want through the CBO process until they get one that gets a good score without actually making substantive changes in each version. And they can specify savings in the bill, without providing detail about how they are likely to be achieved, or they can providing detail on some plan they know, or at least think, will probably be repealed in a separate bill. If CBO analysis where given less weight in the political debate there would be less manipulation, and they would be more useful. An example of this happening in another areas is when reserve requirements stated to be based on the ratings provided by ratings agencies, it eventually reduced the utility of those ratings since it increased the incentive to try and manipulate them.