The Congressional Budget Office

The CBO (Congressional Budget Office) comes up a lot when discussing the deficit or the health care bills. But what exactly is the CBO? An acronym arbitrarily tossed out whenever anyone is talking the health care bill to sound smart? Yes, but besides that (according to their website):

The Congressional Budget Office’s mandate is to provide the Congress with:

• Objective, nonpartisan, and timely analyses to aid in economic and budgetary decisions on the wide array of programs covered by the federal budget and
  
  
• The information and estimates required for the Congressional budget process.

Since the CBO gives numbers related to the budget and the deficit, both Republicans and Democrats have been using their numbers to prove their positions. The Democrats on one hand are using their prediction that the health care bill will be deficit-neutral (or will even reduce the deficit). The Republicans, on the other hand, have used CBO numbers to show how big the deficit is going to be and how much this bill will cost.

When most people see statistics and quotes on news websites, they rarely question the context and true meaning behind the numbers. I never really questioned the CBO on the deficit-neutrality, as I assumed that they were right. While doing some research this weekend, I stumbled upon this interesting post from the Atlantic:

Doug Elmendorf [director of the CBO], the source of that "deficit neutral" score, has made it pretty clear that he does not think the cuts will take place; he's just scoring them because that's what the CBO process requires him to do. After all, the reason that we need these automatic spending cut mechanisms is that Congress can't make a credible commitment to cut costs now. And the reason they can't be relied upon to cut costs in the future is that doing so is politically costly.

The bill is supposedly paid for by a combination of cuts and taxes, and if the cuts that are planned don't happen then this bill is going to be more expensive than we bargained for. This isn't to say that the Congressional Budget Office is lying, or shouldn't be trusted, or even that their report is wrong. It's only important to note that there are stories behind each of the statistics we see in a newspaper article, and these can have big ramifications for public opinion and general knowledge.

Just remember: the things we hold up as facts in politics are not necessarily solid facts.