I was thinking today that the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) serves no useful purpose anymore.
It’s not allowed to tell the truth. Instead, it has become the tool of a Congress willing, eager, and all too skilled at tailoring legislation to achieve a certain desired CBO score based on assumptions everyone knows are invalid. The CBO is not allowed to call Congress on its games when it evaluates bills.
So why bother? The CBO has become a way to give the imprimatur of fiscal propriety to bills that are essentially scams, and the CBO is powerless to do anything but be a yes-man to whatever a clever and duplicitous Congress manages to come up with.
Megan McArdle appears to agree. She writes:
…[I]n order to get [the Senate health care reform] bill passed, the Democrats basically gutted the CBO. Not because they were working with the CBO to get estimates—that’s the CBO’s job, to provide Congress with a cost. But rather, because this bill was something novel in the history of legislation. Previous Congresses wrote bills, and then trimmed them to get a better CBO score: witness the Bush tax cut sunsets. But the Congressional Democrats started out with a CBO score they wanted, and worked backward to the bill. They’ve been pretty explicit about the fact that no one wants this actual bill; rather, the plan is to pass basically anything, and then go and totally rewrite it when the budget spotlight is off. I’m not aware of any other piece of legislation that was passed this way.
Essentially, the Democrats have finished the process of gaming the CBO scores. They’re now meaningless. You don’t pass a piece of legislation that bears any resemblance to what you intend to end up with; you pass a piece of legislation that gets a good CBO score, and then go and alter it piece by piece.
Change you can believe in.
Previously a lifelong Democrat, born in New York and living in New England, surrounded by liberals on all sides, I've found myself slowly but surely 
December 23rd, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Apparatchiks, anyone?
December 23rd, 2009 at 2:45 pm
I read that article yesterday.
There are pro’s and con’s.
Tools, money, data, they can all be misused.
Just because somebody is misusing a tool or money or data doesn’t mean we should take it away.
However, it’s been useful to see projections by CBO are inaccurate and are gamed by the Democrats by front loading taxes and back loading costs.
The Democrats are evil for doing this
December 23rd, 2009 at 2:45 pm
For members of Congress to stand up and say that the CBO is “non-partizan”, implying that their findings are objective and realistic is a prime example of why our citizens have no faith in Congress.
As Mark Twain said “figures don’t lie, but liars figure. The same could be said of the CRU team at the University of East Anglia relative to supporting their political agenda.
Seeking the truth, or some honest assessment always requires multiple sources and thorough analysis. Shortcuts belong to fools and self-serving knaves. The CBO is indeed a waste of taxpayer’s money since the political knaves misuse agency.
December 23rd, 2009 at 6:57 pm
The CBO is a creature of Congress, and since Congress funds it, Congress calls the tune.
The former Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) was also a creature of Congress, and wasn’t as responsive and timely in its analyses as the Congress desired so, 23 years after its creation, it was summarily abolished by Congress in 1995.
I can assure you that other creatures of Congress on Capitol Hill, the remaining sister agencies of the OTA, –the GAO, the CBO and CRS–are acutely aware of that fact.
December 23rd, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Abolish it? Just rename it for clarity: CDBO (Congressional Democrats Budget Office)…
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Completely OT. Another view of Copenhagen
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/22/copenhagen-climate-change-mark-lynas
from Hot Air
December 24th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Statistics can be made to tell the truth. Just grab them by the neck and say “Who are your friends?”
December 24th, 2009 at 9:05 am
I believe that he Congress required the CBO to use a static accounting method. That is, although our experience indicates that tax reductions increase economic activity and thereby increase tax revenues, the CBO must account for the reduction as if it reduced revenues. Similarly, it must treat tax increases as if they will result in increased revenues without regard to the impact the increase will have on reducing profitable activity.
It represents the philosophical difference between the Democrats, who look at the pie as static so that anyone taking a piece of the pie does so at the expense of everyone else (which is how Obama views the USA as using too much of the world’s energy), and Republicans, who look at the pie as growing and shrinking as the economy grows and shrinks, so that anyone who adds value to the economic pie benefits everyone in the pie. The static pie is not real. Use of the static pie is not truthful. Everyone who does so in public is lying and knows that s/he is lying.