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

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (17102)	4/19/2010 10:02:57 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

Are you saying than that the GOP has a better record on estimates than the CBO. Not exactly. My point is the the CBO's record is horrible, and that it silly to rely on it as an authority for how expensive a new federal health care payment program is going to be. Maybe the Republicans are just as bad, I don't know, I haven't examined their record as closely (largely because their are all sorts of Republicans with all sorts of estimates while with the CBO you pretty much have one estimate per law, and its easy to look back later and see if it was correct). But its impossible for the Republicans to have a worse record in terms of percentage of getting the estimate correct because the CBO is batting .000 on this. Which is not to say that there is a clearly better authority on this, just that we can't use the CBO as an authority, which leads us to rely on developing arguments beyond arguments from authority. Which is fine by me because I never cared much for arguments from authority anyway. For specific claims of actually observed or directly calculated fact, sometimes you have to go with them, but for predictions of the future, or even more so for value judgments, arguments from authority are lousy. and btw if you want to continue this discussion come over to the AMD thread. I participate there but I keep up to date here. I can't keep up with all the messages there or on some other threads like PfP, or "View from the Center", so I occasionally skip hundreds or even sometimes thousands of messages.