There’s more than one way to skin a political cat. The new Republican Congress could bring some changes to the political discourse:
The incoming Republican majority in Congress is preparing to give number-crunching a controversial twist, and the new math could make it easier for the GOP to cut taxes.
For years, leading GOP lawmakers have wanted to change the way that the nonpartisan congressional staff calculates — or, in Washington parlance, scores — the budgetary cost of changes to the tax code.
Budget scoring now is fairly straightforward: Just figure out how much more money a tax increase would produce for the Treasury or how much a tax cut would cost in lost revenue.
Republicans, however, want two key congressional offices to use complex models to try to predict the broader effect of hikes and cuts on the economy. The process is called dynamic scoring.
This can be effected without being subject to filibustering and or the prospect of meeting a presidential veto for a simple reason that most people don’t understand: the Congressional Budget Office operates at the pleasure of Congress. You sometimes hear the CBO characterized as “non-partisan” but that’s an exaggeration. The CBO studies the things that Congress wants them to study in the way in which Congress wants them to study them and that can be by direction of the Congressional leadership.
I have little doubt that this will be vilified as politicization but the reality is that the CBO, like the Bureau of Economic Analysis or the Census Bureau, is inherently political.
This would be a change in how the CBO has always done the calculations. As we all know, the idea that tax cuts bring in more revenue than is lost by the cuts is not supported by data. It will allow larger tax cuts and lead to more debt, which we do not need. If the GOP wants to make government smaller, cut spending, don’t do this. Or, do this AND cut spending.
Steve