Congressional Budget Office said Obama’s gestimate of saving a trillion over the next 10 years is highly speculative! CBO doesn’t want to hang themselves, so they gave us a tentitave cost for the Healthcare Reform, because they don’t have a clue what all the “Fix Its” that will be added to the reform if passed may cost.
CBO should have flatly refused Obama and gang when asked to figure cost on a skeleton bill that as Pelosi and Obama have said, no one, yes no one really knows what’s in the bill. CBO had to do what the commander and chief ordered, but they know beyond any doubt that the figures they gave America today has nothing to do with anything. This is but one more coverup for the Obama corruption!
My only questions to my fellow Americans is this: (1) How does CBO figure costs on a skeleton bill, (2) Why did CBO even attempt to figure costs on a bill not completed, in fact not even on the table for a vote, and (3) Why would Americans consider anything that Obama and other Democrats proposes after our devastating experience with the “Stimulus Reform?”
Today, March 18th 2010, we’re in the hands of a few Democrats and hopefully they will stop this reform from being passed, for their Nation, their fellow Americans and their children. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know we’re being scammed by some of the biggest scammers in all of our Nations’ history.
May God Bless America and those few Democrats who are holding our future in their hands.
Daniel Horowitz
Neil Stevens
Moe Lane
Steve Maley
Jake Walker
Marcia, Marcia, Marcia
mikerazar (Diary) Thursday, March 18th at 3:27PM EST (link)You are so right that it gives me chills. The CBO methodology at its best is hopelessly flawed. You can’t make ten year “point” predictions with any confidence. At best you can try to estimate the probability that some number will be in a certain range in ten years. Even that is highly suspect.
What the CBO does is to take some assumptions from Congress, add in some assumptions about growth in GDP, and lack of unforeseen events and other un-named assumptions . Next they play with these numbers using sophisticated mathematical and statistical tools which may or may not be applicable. Their conclusions are close to meaningless. The nature of their assumptions assures a bias in favor of lower spending and higher growth and revenues. That, together with Murphy’s law, practically guarantees bad projections..
A free dinner at Ruth’s Chris to anyone who can get Paul Ryan to talk to me about this.
We have a nation to save, people.
To be perfectly fair
aesthete (Diary) Thursday, March 18th at 3:38PM EST (link)The CBO will tell anyone who asks that their reports are best guesses, and they are aware of the difficulties in calculating policy. (Full disclosure: a friend of mine works at CBO.) They are professionals, and mostly do the same with Republicans, as well. Case in point: Ryan’s excellent plan, where they took him at his word concerning what his tax scheme would make over the period that they evaluated.
With all of those limitations in mind, it’s still a pretty useful tool, and is good for short term analysis.
To digress a bit, I wish the Tea Parties would all collectively embrace the Ryan plan or something that is similarly specific.
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice – G.K. Chesterton
I vehemently disagree, Aesthete
mikerazar (Diary) Thursday, March 18th at 3:59PM EST (link)I’m sure your friend is a lovely human being. “Professional” only means they get paid for useless work. It is just as useless for republicans. and for Paul Ryan. Predicting the future based on ridiculous assumptions is what caused the financial meltdown. How could housing prices go down? That, at a time when there were millions more housing units than people needing homes.
Sometimes the best you can do is no good at all. Until you put stress on those predictions by varying the assumptions and assigning some probability to various events, you are shooting in the dark.
Short term? Yeah…I concede it is easier to predict next year’s superbowl winner than 2020′s. Not much comfort.
Let’s see. Back in 2000, what probability would you have assigned to Bush’s first term having to deal with 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, phony climate change studies, Hillary Clinton being taken seriously as a competent individual? Need I go on?
The Ryan plan, while not perfect, is so much better than anything else out there, that he should win a Nobel Prize for honesty. Good luck explaining that to the Tea-Partiers.
We have a nation to save, people.
Where people get confused wrt the CBO
aesthete (Diary) Thursday, March 18th at 5:23PM EST (link)is that they believe that its purpose is to be some kind of oracle, or predictor of what happens. As you say, in a complex and non-deterministic system (which our world, more often than not, is), such a task is a fools’ errand. The CBO’s goal is to serve as a benchmark of sorts for evaluating policy as it would be under today’s laws and circumstances, and nothing more. From the CBO’s site:
“By statute, CBO’s baseline projections must estimate the future paths of federal spending and revenues under current law and policies. The baseline is therefore not intended to be a prediction of future budgetary outcomes; instead, it is meant to serve as a neutral benchmark that lawmakers can use to measure the effects of proposed changes to spending and taxes. So for that reason and others, actual budgetary outcomes are almost certain to differ from CBO’s baseline projections. For a related discussion, see Chapter 1 of CBO’s Budget and Economic Outlook; see also The Uncertainty of Budget Projections: A Discussion of Data and Methods for supplemental information.”
These estimates are useful when those using them are aware of the stated purpose and limitations of the CBO. Therefore, Dem claims that this will definitively help with budgetary issues based on its CBO score is fraudulent, as the CBO will freely admit. Its analyses shouldn’t ever, ever, ever be used to predict outcomes of bills; it’s not their job to do so. Hope that helps!
And yeah, I agree about the Tea Party: if they want to get serious, their members are gonna have to embrace specific plans like Ryan’s, rather than spout platitudes.
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice – G.K. Chesterton
The constitution is a written document too
Common_Cents (Diary) Thursday, March 18th at 5:32PM EST (link)If you are human you have biases no matter who you are. The CBO should have tossed this 2500 page vague pos back in their faces. CBO should not score anything as prelim until they go through it thoroughly. The headline will be 940b and the fine print realistic correction will be a double or triple.
Obama=Golfer in Chief, Leading from,
behind, the Back Nine.Leaders don’t create movements. Movements create leaders. Get involved. Your future depends on it.
Govt “invests” YOUR tax money for POLITICAL return rather than economic return.
They're required by law
aesthete (Diary) Thursday, March 18th at 5:37PM EST (link)to produce a cost statement and mandate statement for every bill reported by a Congressional committee — there’s no choice in the matter.
On the prelim: I agree.
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice – G.K. Chesterton
You are absolutely correct, aesthete
mikerazar (Diary) Thursday, March 18th at 6:14PM EST (link)except for one thing. The public, the press, Congress, the executive branch, and did I leave out anyone, treat the CBO projections as hard numbers. I know that the methodology is somewhat prescribed in a mid nineties statute. There was once a law passed (Indiana, I think) to make pi equal to 3, so that a legislator’s son could pass math. The CBO is even worse because it doesn’t have the same absurdity on its face.
Probability and statistics are very hard subjects. Even for PhDs. Do you remember a year ago there was a dispute between the OMB and CBO over whether the ten year deficit would be $8T or $9T. It was reported as a serious story by the msm and the Fox folks too. Oh yeah…we can live with 8, but 9 is really getting too high.
What a bunch of morons. Even if the analysis was sound (it was not) the standard deviation would have been $4 or $5 trillion. An exercise in futility cannot be excused just because it is the best we can do. That’s just a lie.
If you look over some of my diaries on the CBO and the budget, you will find links to spreadsheets and a discussion of why the problem is so difficult.
There is one crystal clear fact that outweighs all others. If we do not figure out a way to get high growth in the economy, we are doomed.
We have a nation to save, people.
This is absolutely true
aesthete (Diary) Thursday, March 18th at 10:59PM EST (link)Education is critical, and unfortunately, these numbers are often horribly misused. I’m not really sure what could be done about that directly, except further education efforts. As you say, even PhDs have problems with this stuff.
Not to be the dark cloud on the burgeoning “conservative revolution”, but unless the Republican party’s members really start to take small government and the budget seriously (i.e., pressuring their representatives to enact specific, Ryan-like cuts), then the only difference between the Dems and Reps is the speed at which they go to Gomorrah.
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice – G.K. Chesterton
We are on the same page.
mikerazar (Diary) Thursday, March 18th at 11:12PM EST (link)If we can’t even get the GOP to rally ’round Ryan (I want the trademark for that), then we are lost. If we do, then we have to hope that the truth can overcome the lies of the other side.
We have a nation to save, people.
Mike, what you and aesthete are discussing is important.
Flagstaff (Diary) Saturday, March 20th at 6:18PM EST (link)Unfortunately, it’s too late to help us this time, and probably too complex for CongressCritters to understand why it needs to change.
On aesthete’s side, the CBO is doing what they’re paid to do, but they’re only paid to do an incomplete job, and it isn’t well understood. On your side, they should do the complete job.
The complete job would include complete disclosure that there is a range of $X to $Y within which the “answer” probably falls. If they did that, the public is familiar enough with polls to understand that the range is the margin of error, and would also understand that even that range may be too small. And the CBO should include with every report the statement that “This report is useful only in comparing various approaches to the given subject. It cannot be used to predict what will actually occur.” In fact, that’s what Obama is trying to do when he says, “Without the stimulus, unemployment would be even worse than it is.”
I’m afraid this is beyond the understanding of most CongressCritters. It’s NEVER mentioned in the media reports.
I’m not even sure the CBO took the out-of-pocket costs of higher taxes into account when figuring the future “cost” of medical insurance under this plan.
“The press is so powerful in its image-making role that it can make a criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”– Malcolm X, Audubon Ballroom, December 13, 1964
Horseshoes, handgrenades, nukes, and budget projections
Achance (Diary) Thursday, March 18th at 3:37PM EST (link)are about the only place where close counts. I’ve done a lot of cost projections on labor agreements and legislation; at least I can say that I didn’t knowingly and willfully lie to the Legislature, but I sure got some of them baaaad wrong.
In Vino Veritas
CBO has been pressured or compromised
Common_Cents (Diary) Thursday, March 18th at 3:42PM EST (link)How can you honestly Give a prelim without even going thru the bill thoroughly? Plus even give this bill any serious consideration when it has mandatory tax for years before most of the benefits kick in.
Obama=Golfer in Chief, Leading from,
behind, the Back Nine.Leaders don’t create movements. Movements create leaders. Get involved. Your future depends on it.
Govt “invests” YOUR tax money for POLITICAL return rather than economic return.