ResearchMonkey
Well-Known Member
I guess you didn't get the Steny Hoyer memo....
DON'T TALK ABOUT THE CBO REPORT!!! (its full of misunderstoodness)
DON'T TALK ABOUT THE CBO REPORT!!! (its full of misunderstoodness)
Plus I would like to know what crystal ball they are using to be able to determine financial outlooks over a 20 year period on spending that hasn't even started yet.
What new medical technologies are on the horizon and what will they cost? What diseases, new or old, will be prevalent and how much will it cost to treat them.
More importantly, when was the last time the government started something that didn't end up costing multiple times more than initial estimates?
The bill is crap, its a liberal wad we're being forced to swallow. I don't care much for rape.
I guess you didn't get the Steny Hoyer memo....
DON'T TALK ABOUT THE CBO REPORT!!! (its full of misunderstoodness)
Hey, Spike... I've been digging around, trying to find exactly how a bill that estimates around $1 trillion in new spending is supposed to reduce the deficit. Care to explain?
CBO has to assess bills based on the writing of the bill. If the bills says "we will create a law that does X to save Y money in the future" The CBO has to calculate as that as written.
The answer, unfortunately, is that the budget office is required to take written legislation at face value and not second-guess the plausibility of what it is handed. So fantasy in, fantasy out.
In reality, if you strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion.
A government takeover of all federally financed student loans — which obviously has nothing to do with health care — is rolled into the bill because it is expected to generate $19 billion in deficit reduction.
I suggest digging around for the CBO report.
From the NYT op-ed page...
Conservative View On Reliability Of CBO Depends Upon Whether They Like The Results
March 19, 2010 — Ron Chusid
Conservatives tend to begin with their position and then work backwards to twist the evidence to try to support their position. We often see this in their distortions of science with regards to evolution and climate change. In the case of health care reform they repeat the arguments fed to them by the insurance industry while ignoring any objective data. When the Congressional Budget Office put out a favorable report on the current legislation conservatives began to attack the validity of the CBO’s report.
The reality is that when the CBO is off it historically is on the side of underestimating cost savings. This is because new and untried cost savings measures cannot be scored by the CBO resulting in them being left out of the calculations.
Conservatives now ignore the conclusions of the Congressional Budget Office as they did when the CBO disputed the claims of conservatives about the effects of the pubic option. Conservatives ignored the CBO’s warnings about the cost of the Iraq war. However, when a CBO report of an earlier draft of health care legislation showed that cost savings would not fund health care reform, conservatives were quick to quote this report. Once the legislation was tweaked and reports showed the plan to be fiscally sound, conservatives no longer respected the results of the CBO.
Think Progress points out that Michael Steele and the Republican National Committee now claim that “you can’t believe the numbers” from the CBO. However, they also note that Steele and the RNC have cited CBO numbers to support their arguments. This was done as recently as March 5 to criticize Obama’s proposed bank fee.
Simon Owens provides additional examples of how Conservative bloggers loved the CBO before they hated it.