During my college days as a computer-science major, a popular term was “GIGO” — which stood for “Garbage In, Garbage Out” — which warned you that even if you had the slickest program this side of COBOL (remember, I’m old), it would not matter if the data were nonsense.
The Congressional Budget Office is the slickest budget shop Congress could wish for. So it came as a shock to some conservatives today that the CBO examined H.R. 2 (The Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act) and came to the conclusion that “enacting H.R. 2 would probably increase federal budget deficits over the
2012–2019 period by a total of roughly $145 billion.”
Democrats are trumpeting, predictably, that this means that RJKHCLA (which, I think, is Icelandic for “thank God”) is an act of fiscal hypocrisy by Republicans.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The CBO is simply running in reverse an enormous exercise in GIGO — so think of this as GOGI budgeting. Recall that the rules forced CBO to incorporate a wide range of budget gimmicks in their original estimate of the health care law:
● Leaving out the roughly $115 billion in discretionary spending needed to implement the bill,
● Counting the $70 billion in premiums for long-term care insurance (CLASS Act), but ignoring the unsustainable CLASS Act spending that starts after the first 10 years,
● Using over $50 billion in higher Social Security taxes to offset health spending,
● Leaving out entirely the cost of paying Medicare doctors,
● Pretending that over $450 billion in payment cuts to Medicare providers will be possible without changing in any real way the operation of Medicare,
● And planning to collect a tax on cadillac health insurance that the unions have already gutted and will not tolerate.
In short, there was never any reason to believe that the law reduced the deficit by roughly $140 billion over ten years. Starting two new open-ended entitlements without fixing the existing budgetary cancers just doesn’t work that way.
For the same reasons, repealing Obamacare is simply a first step toward fiscal sanity that should happen as soon as possible.
Don’t blame the CBO. Blame GOGI budgeting.
— Douglas Holtz-Eakin is president of the American Action Forum.
What force could prompt the CBO to abandon its wrong assumptions left over from 2010? Does the House have any say in the CBO's operations?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat force? Wrong assumptions?
The CBO makes its estimates based on what it is asked to estimate.
The estimate of the original Obamacare monstrosity was based on what was in that thing, and nothing else. That meant if paying Medicare doctors was not part of the bill, it was not part of the estimate. That meant that if the bill contained a cadillac tax on union insurance plans, the estimate included those taxes in the estimate.
That also means that the estimate of the effect of the repeal of the Obamacare monstrosity includes all of the unreality that was in that monstrosity, as if it were actually true, and in the absence of anything else -- just those two bills, original, repeal.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAs I said on Exchequer, the doc fix canard is just a canard. It should never have been included in Obamacare in the first place, because it would have to be fixed whether or not Obamacare passed. Including the doc fix in the deficit projections would be like including the AMT fix. Both are independent of Obamacare. Even NRO's Jeffrey Anderson admits that here (after asserting the opposite and getting called out on it):
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Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseEric:"It should never have been included in Obamacare in the first place, because it would have to be fixed whether or not Obamacare passed. Including the doc fix in the deficit projections would be like including the AMT fix. Both are independent of Obamacare."
Really??? That is a very interesting statement considering that the so-called "Doc Fix's" funding is dependent on the ACA. Higher-wage earners who participate in state run health care exchanges and whose income far surpasses the subsidy limit--$88,000 for a family of four--will be penalized (taxed) in order to "recapture" revenue to pay for the fix.
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Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat really matters is whether the public will buy the argument, ludicrous as it may be, that repealing Obamacare will increase the deficit. Will they? Will Republicans have the rhetorical dexterity to challenge Democrats and the media on this?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat is with the hyphenated name? You are my age. When I first saw one of your post, I thought you were a young guy.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWasn't another accounting trick of Obamacare 10 years of revenue and 6 years of outlay?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe next two years, as it relates to all issues, will revolve around the MSM lying about everything all the time in support of Democrats and to attack Republicans.
All these issues will be, "how is it reported"?
I have stated before (and will continue to say it over and over) the MSM, in two short years has gone from; biased to corrupt to criminal all in support of Obama, the Democrats and the left.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseRA-Yes. Paul Ryan asked the CBO to re-score using the proper assumptions with doc fix etc.. added in and it came back with a huge deficit. So congress can ask for the CBO to score with proper assumptions built in.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse@RAMiller
The House has only say as far as what numbers it submits too it, or what it tells the CBO it can score.
So as the article points out.....GIGO
The Dems/Reps have their own personal scoring machine as well, so they play with a set of numbers and tweak them to arrive at a number they want to be shown.
They then take those numbers and supply them to the CBO and tell the CBO to score them.
Also keep in mind that all CBO formulas are static.
They expect all behaviors to be the same.
They don't factor in downturns or upturns in the economy, nor do they factor in any change of behavior by the tax payer.
So certain things that CBO scores should really be looked into and taken note of some of the "fine print" that they put into their reports.
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