Congress's Biggest Obstacle

[Donkees]

Though the Congressional Budget Office is obscure to most Americans, politicians have enabled it to stand in the way of progressive ambitions. They don’t have to.

BY DAVID DAYEN JANUARY 28, 2020

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“There are times that bad budget policy is excellent policy,” says Scott Lilly, who worked for 31 years in Congress, mostly for Congressman Dave Obey (D-WI), a longtime House appropriator. “If you look at World War II, we ended up at a public debt that was 108 percent of GDP in 1946. So we shouldn’t have engaged in WWII, we should have let Hitler take over Europe and sat back? That would have been good policy because we would have been more fiscally sound?”

Even CBO will tell you that they deliver a range of options that should not be taken as gospel, but instead viewed as baseline information to weigh against other costs and benefits. “We have to do a number and we do our best,” says Phillip Swagel, who took over as CBO director in June.

With the CBO, Washington has allowed itself to be governed by an unelected collection of well-meaning economists given a fundamentally impossible task. Even CBO’s critics praise it for being a relatively honest broker that can provide valuable insight into the fiscal consequences of legislation. But that’s not the sum total of policy, and scorekeeping tends to create a logic of its own. It unconsciously assigns merit to legislation based on thin and at times inaccurate criteria. And even if it stops stupid shit from happening, who decides what qualifies as stupid?

DESPITE BEING A FIXTURE in modern legislative life, the Congressional Budget Office is a relatively new institution. All of the New Deal and Great Society programs passed into law without a CBO score, from Social Security to Medicare and Medicaid. Like so many dominant elements of our current political framework, CBO dates back to the disruptions of the 1970s.

Ultimately, what needs to be understood is that CBO scores are just data points, not obstacles. They serve as a reasonable baseline to discuss the budget, and that’s about it. If you explain the budgetary cost of a policy that will cover everyone’s health care or eliminate their student debt, policymakers should weigh that against the attendant benefits to society. Republicans like to talk about “cost-benefit analysis,” but Congress has created a structure to simply run the costs without the benefits. That mentality must change if we’re to have a decent conversation about the role of government.

https://prospect.org/politics/congress-biggest-obstacle-congressional-budget-office/