on this or any topic, actually...

the opposite of what I assume would be the view of a Democrat.


Not just economics, but other stuff as well.

should hold and maybe someone will disagree. I sure would like to see the list.

I will tell you my views on any subject you like, I will be very careful not to allow emotion to be part of it so as to protect my posting privileges.

So what exactly would you like to know?

you say things leads me to believe you think you know what should be. If it would help put me on ignore

And it's often added asterisks of its own because it really dislikes the partisan blather that accompanies anything it says, and the partisan rules imposed on it.

It doesn't like supply-side forecasts being foisted upon it. But "dynamic scoring" doesn't require that particular hypothesis. It can require it, but shouldn't.

Similarly, the system that is currently foisted upon the CBO sucks. It led to what the CBO said were insane forecasts in 2000 about budget surplus predictions. (We love us our insanity when it's favorable to us.) It had to predict large surpluses because the methodology Congress imposed required that they assume that the past is the future.

In the face of an already record expansion and an unlikely run of Congressional restraint in 2000, even as all the leading economic indicators were screaming "recession" and hiring was flatlining, the CBO had to assume that the expansion and hiring would continue uninterrupted for another decade and that Congressional restraint, already fraying, would also continue unchanged. Calls for "dynamic scoring" that would have led to realistic forecasts were ignored because (D) hated the idea of not being able to claim huge, huge budget surpluses. They had plans for that money. And they were royally pissed off when the CBO said that the forecasts were highly improbable.

Sadly, the recession happened in 2001 as predicted by everybody but the CBO (officially at least) and the (D) candidates and single-handedly wiped out the budget surpluses. But when the (R) won control of the government, suddenly they found uses for those huge budget surpluses that only fools thought would materialize, and those projections became the rationale for the tax cuts that also single-handedly wiped out the budget surpluses. Calls for dynamic scoring sort of vanished because the (R) loved the huge budget surpluses predicted. And were royally pissed when the CBO said they were highly improbable. (And we still see people using these 1/10-assed projections as though they were somehow reasonable and meaningful. Husserl rules.)

Same for the HCRA and ACA. The CBO said that it was compelled to use the budgetary guidelines that the legislation itself required. And it balked, saying a lot of the compulsory assumptions were highly problematic, and rigged to provide low-ball estimates. I imagine being a statistician for the CBO must feel like being a media-rights monitor under Putin. You issue your reports but you know that they'll be edited to fit the official narrative and your name will still stuck on them, but to object is to get kicked in the teeth and groin. Any vestigial ethical sense can only cause extreme pain, psychological or monetary.

It's a question of which form of compulsory bad economics you like. In principle dynamic scoring is a fine idea, but given how polarized and politicized the idea of actually crunching numbers is the result is likely to be as skewed than it is now so there's no point in it. Note that we had a lot of CBO and administration projections in 2009 and 2010 that were also utter crap. Pretty much the only predictions that turned out true were those that were completely untestable. The only light in the darkness was the CBO's saying from time to time that it was forced to use crappy assumptions that mirrored those used in 2000--the past is the future, no matter how much legislation or economic events affect the future.

In fact the fifth paragraph discussing the (D) single-handedly wiping out budget surpluses. Only to have the (R) gained control Govt. find uses for those huge budget surpluses.

I wonder if you could tell me how the (D) wiped out surpluses,and at the same time the (R) would later find other things to do with them. Do you think they were/are running a loop on tax payers?

You seem to have an understanding of this issue going back to the 2009-2010 about CBO predictions that were crap. I wonder if they were crap because they were forced to use crappy assumptions?


Thanks.