Yves Smith — Announcing (Actually, Confirming) Our Focus on the CBO’s Dubious Models and Political Bias

We've been writing about abuses of power and process at the Congressional Budget Office and will be ramping up our coverage further now that ranking member Bernie Sanders has a new team at the Budget Committee, which among other things supervises the CBO. And the CBO is going to be the subject of a major political fight over how it prepares its estimates of the economic and fiscal impact of pending legislation. As we'll discuss below, Republicans plan to mandate that the CBO use something called dynamic scoring, which has the effect of making tax cuts look far more beneficial to the economy than they are, by effectively claiming that tax cuts boost growth, which then boosts tax receipts. It would effectively institutionalize the Laffer curve, which has been widely and repeatedly debunked. As troubling as this development is, there's already a lot not to like in how the CBO operates.…

The reason that the CBO matters so much is that its estimates are taken as gospel, as unbiased, accurate, fair, and “nonpartisan”. But as we’ve demonstrated in previously posts, the CBO has repeatedly taken what amount to partisan positions and has skewed its analysis in gross violation of its own procedures to produce results that have had enormous impact on policy debates. The CBO is firmly neoliberal, which in and of itself represents a considerable bias.…

The fundamental beef of Follette and Sheiner with the CBO model is that it naively assumes past growth in health care spending as the basis for its long-term projections. The result is that it shows that trees will grow to the sky. One of the things anyone who has built forecasting models will tell you is you come up with assumptions that look reasonable and then sanity check the output (for instance, does your model say in year 10 that your revenues will be 3x what you can produce given your forecast level in plant and investment? If so, you need to make some revisions). The Fed economists point out numerous ways that the model output flies in the face of what amounts to common sense in the world of long term budget forecasting.…

Jeff Madrick notes:

The problems with the CBO are bigger than this latest brouhaha. First, they have structural and institutional problems.… 

Second, the CBO regularly makes ideological assumptions that take neo-classical propositions at face value.…

And, frankly, they often make preposterous assumptions.…

Yves:

The CBO, much like the Fed, are bastions of hidden power that lie outside democratic accountability. But the CBO’s and OMB’s clout is even less visible than that of the central bank. CBO forecasts are treated by Congress and media as gospel. The CBO is assumed to be above partisan influence. But it is partisan in a manner that is not widely understood. It is deeply neoliberal in its orientation, and often acts as a lobbyist rather than an analyst, for instance, issuing

One of the big reasons that the CBO manages to avoid criticism is that, like the private equity industry and the Fed, it shrouds itself in secrecy. It seldom makes its models public,…

The CBO also too acts too often an advocate rather than the dispassionate analyst that it is mandated to be via statute.…

Naked Capitalism
Announcing (Actually, Confirming) Our Focus on the CBO’s Dubious Models and Political Bias
Yves Smith