Herman Cain: For years, Democrats have manipulated the way the CBO "scores" tax and spending bills, and it looks like this is about to end. This should lead to much better economic legislation.
◼ GOP getting ready to eliminate dishonest 'scoring' of spending and tax bills - Cain TV
You may not know a lot about the Congressional Budget Office or its "scoring" of tax and spending bills, but it carries a lot of weight in Washington - and that's often a problem given the rules congressional Democrats have imposed on the economists who run the CBO.
When Congress proposes a spending and/or tax bill, the CBO develops a "score" of the bill that's designed to show its impact on the budget and deficits. Now that can be a useful thing if it's done honestly, but under Democrat-imposed rules, it's not. The CBO has to score the bills under the assumption that the numbers Congress gives it are accurate, and it makes no provision for the likelihood that a major change in spending or tax laws will impact people's economic behavior.
So if the Democrats want to raise taxes by $10 billion in a year, the CBO has to assume this will automatically raise exactly $10 billion in revenue. We all know life doesn't work that way, of course, because people make adjustments to new costs imposed on them. It's like me raising the price of my books by $5 each and assuming the sales wouldn't be affected in any way by the higher price. That's nuts. Of course they would. (Otherwise I would obviously raise them through the roof. Why not?) But this is how the Democrats have been making the CBO do things for years, which makes it all the more maddening that the political class and many pundits (including many conservatives) treat pronouncements from the CBO as if they are an unassailable look into the future, rather than some Keynesian economist's wild guess about what's going to happen.
Thankfully, it looks like the new Republican Congress is finally going to change these rules... KEEP READING
