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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (583265)	8/30/2010 10:18:03 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573213

I said that a specific CBO estimate was meaningless, really "estimate" is being generous to it, since they just plugged in how much government money was spent in different ways in to a formula that assumes what the conclusion they presented. I also said that the type of projection that the CBO more often does, about the budget impact of bills, projected deficits, etc. is always unreliable no matter who does it. The CBO probably does about as good of job as anyone else though, its all guesses, but their guesses aren't worse than the next guys, I didn't say anything they ever say is worthless. But if I had it wouldn't have meant that much in this context anyway. We either use the CBO data in which case the argument presented in the article I posted is pretty solid, or we ignore it completely, in which case you also have to toss out the claim about how much the tax cuts "cost" and where such a big part of causing the deficit (a rather silly argument anyway, since the increase in spending is more than the total of the deficit), and you still have the IRS historical data supporting the argument from the WSJ and TaxProf. Take your pick.