Keith Hennessey thinks that the Congressional Budget Office was pressured to hide important information during the health care bill debate. CBO's recent data (PDF page 24, document page 6) shows that the new health care law will increase federal entitlement spending by $401 billion over the next decade, and will increase taxes by $525 billion over that same time period. Hennessey writes in his blog:
Based on CBO’s normal scoring practices and the intense scrutiny of both CBO and this legislation, this cannot possibly have been an oversight. I would bet heavily that CBO was pressured not to show this information.Keith Hennessey served as Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council at the White House from August 2002 through the end of 2007. In 2008 and the first three weeks of 2009, he was Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Director of the National Economic Council, a position now held by Dr. Larry Summers for President Obama.
If I’m right, CBO should have resisted this pressure and provided a picture that was both more complete and consistent with how they usually score legislation.
Deficits matter. So do spending and revenues. If they remain in place, these laws will make government spending $401 B larger this decade. By reducing the budget deficit through tax increases, these bills will shift some of the fiscal burden from the future to the present. By increasing government spending, these bills will increase the cost of government on the private sector that pays for it. That latter point is an important piece of information that Congress should have had when they voted.
I am generally a fan of CBO, and please don’t group me with the bashers who say they did everything wrong. This, however, was a failure.
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