Nancy Pelosi announced yesterday how pleased she was with the precision of the CBO report on the cost of Obamacare. It would be easy to laugh out loud if so much were not at stake.
Nancy Pelosi has no credibility to lose, so she did no harm to herself. The tactics Democrats have used as to CBO scoring of bills, however, has destroyed the CBO’s credibility.
The CBO is supposed to be a neutral calculator of legislation. And it is. I have no doubt that the people at the CBO do their best to calculate the cost of a bill, given the assumptions the CBO is required to follow.
And that is the catch. Whereas on less politicized legislation there may be reasonable assumptions built into a bill and requested by those seeking a cost estimate, as to the health care bills proposed by Democrats it has been all games.
Completely unrealistice assumptions have been foisted upon the CBO, and the CBO has been required to score the bill with phony math.
Jeffrey Anderson at The Weekly Standard has a devastating take-down of the CBO report on the cost of the latest Democratic incarnation of the health care bill, CBO: Obamacare Would Cost Over $2 Trillion:
For a variety of reasons, this tally doesn’t remotely reflect the bill’s real ten-year costs. First, it includes 2010 as the initial year. As most people are well aware, 2010 has now been underway for some time. Therefore, the CBO would normally count 2011 as the first year of its analysis, just as it counted 2010 as the first year when analyzing the initial House health bill in the middle of 2009. But under strict instructions from Democratic leaders, and over strong objections from Republicans, the CBO dutifully scored 2010 as the first year of the latest version of Obamacare. If the clock were started in 2011, the first full year that the bill could possibly be in effect, the CBO says that the bill’s ten-year costs would be $1.2 trillion.
There is more, much more. Read the full article.
The CBO report amounts to a fraud perpetrated not by the CBO, but by the Democrats who forced the CBO to play these games.
Update: Michelle Malkin has more, The Deem-o-crats’ towering deception
——————————————–
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY