I’m sorry; with that assertion (assuming, for arguments’ sake that you were actually serious), you’ve just blown up any credibility you might have had in a manner that would make the Muppets’ Crazy Harry envious. What the GOP has “rediscovered” is simply the pleasure of moral-sounding “do as I say, not as I do”-ism. They rediscover this like clockwork every time they are out of power, only to conveniently re-forget it when they regain power.

The CBO’s expertise lies in knowing how to read laws and how they interact with existing law. By design, the CBO’s forecasts preempt the predictions used for comparison, so there is some merit to matching subsequent predictions.

That said, I do remember having seen things that support the general point, but I think people are too willing to do the analysis in the abstract, without figuring in the realities of the situations (IE: you should well know that going ‘lol Dems’ to the current budget problems is highly disingenuous, or alternately, taking the first two years of Clinton as ‘bad’ even though it’s clear that they were the first two years of a good trend. Just because you can’t turn around the federal government on a dime…)

-Mecha

Well, there’s an interesting blog post at Reason’s Hit & Run.

http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/24/how-much-does-health-care-refo

Here’s the gist. If you say that the first decade of health care will be from 2010 until 2019, you get one number for the cost of the program. Fair enough. The CBO says that the costs don’t start kicking in until *AFTER* year four is done. So the last 6 years in the decade are the ones where we see costs that are representative of how much it will cost down the road (again, assuming that the actual numbers won’t deviate overly from the CBO’s benchmark).

The costs of the first decade, as stated, are about 40% less than they will be in subsequent decades. Using that number is… well… I’m sure that now that such has been pointed out, at least those on this site will avoid quoting it as the cost.

And, of course, Republicans deserve to be put in an eternal return where they relive Christ’s passion from Thursday until Friday Sunset over and over and over and over and over again like on Groundhog Day, with special attention focused on the moment where they realize that God has forsaken them. Let them scream to the heavens for their absent Father, forever.

“Historically, the accuracy of CBO’s two-year forecasts and five-year projections has been very similar to the accuracy of those by the Blue Chip consensus (an average of private-sector forecasters) and the Administration.”

Given that the question was “How accurate are CBO’s economic forecasts?”, the answer of “we come to many of the same conclusions as other folks!” is one that leads me to this conclusion:

If the CBO were accurate, they’d say “we’re accurate”. If they could make a vague case that they were pretty accurate all other things being equal, they’d say “we’re pretty accurate all other things being equal.” They didn’t even say *THAT*. They said “we reached the same conclusions as other folks.” Fair enough, I guess. No one knows what the economy will look like in a decade, right?

So what about the budget predictions? Let’s look at *THAT* question and answer:
How accurate are CBO’s budget projections?
By statute, CBO’s baseline projections must estimate the future paths of federal spending and revenues under current law and policies. The baseline is therefore not intended to be a prediction of future budgetary outcomes; instead, it is meant to serve as a neutral benchmark that lawmakers can use to measure the effects of proposed changes to spending and taxes. So for that reason and others, actual budgetary outcomes are almost certain to differ from CBO’s baseline projections.

Look at that answer again.

Read it yourself:
http://www.cbo.gov/aboutcbo/faqs.shtml

I can’t claim to reach any conclusion but this: when it comes to economic forecasts, they crib from the consensus. When it comes to budget forecasts, they don’t even pretend that their info is anything more than a “benchmark”.

I’m not terribly impressed.

(And, of course, Republicans should go to hell and be impaled on firey spits and have their innards eaten by red (fireproof!) ants as they scream for relief, mercy, even annihilation, from the Democrats who will be able to joyously answer “no” from their vantage point in heaven.)

We’re not a year into this presidency and the fiscal record to date is atrocious. I wish people would stop making this an R versus D thing. So long as you continue in that dynamic, it’s just the Rs wanting to waste billions/trillions on their shitty ideas and Ds wanting to waste billions/trillions on theirs.

The fact that insane, disingenuous Republicans are now rediscovering their long-abandoned commitment to fiscal discipline doesn’t mean they are wrong. Nowhere did I promote anything remotely Republican.

The problem for principled advocates of restrained government spending and intrusion is that we’re lumped in with the Limbaughs and the Becks, casting our genuine and legitimate qualms with populist nutjobs. It isn’t that there aren’t principled opponents of Obama’s (and Bush’s) spending programs, but that the loudest ones getting all the attention make it seem as if the only people against it are doing so for partisan or otherwise disingenuous reasons.