A Transparent CBO Would Be a Pointless CBO

Whenever legislation wends its way to the floor of Congress, there is a breathless period when everyone waits to see what score it will get from the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. That score will indicate whether the proposed law will increase the deficit, or decrease it, and how it will affect the public and the economy. Those findings, in turn, may well determine whether the bill lives or dies.

This process can be quite complicated; often a bad score forces legislators back to the drawing board to come up with some more pleasing bill. The architects of health-care reform spent a great deal of time tossing proposals at the CBO, seeing what the CBO model spat out and modifying things accordingly so that Democrats ultimately ended up with something that scored as both reducing the budget deficit and costing less than a trillion dollars over 10 years.