It is truly sad that so many people posing as journalists consider opinions to be facts.

Here, the Daily Beast is proud that someone at CNN essentially said that CBO’s numbers should be relied on because sometime in the past, Republican Representative Norman relied on them. 

The author did not give an example where the CBO’s predictions were accurate, nor did she try.  That would have been hard.  When the IRS or CBO gives estimates of how much it can collect if it gets more agents it just pulls the numbers out of a hat. 

If they could actually collect those extra amounts at the IRS, we have never seen the results. 

CNN Anchor Pulls Receipts to Expose GOP Rep’s Hypocrisy After Israel Bill

CNN anchor Kate Bolduan came prepared with receipts on Friday when Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) attempted to dismiss the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s analysis that the House GOP’s Israel aid bill would add $26.8 billion to the national budget deficit.

While the South Carolina lawmaker fumed that he has “very little confidence in the CBO” because they “have an agenda to back up whatever view” the Biden administration presents, Bolduan pointed out that Norman previously touted the office’s findings when it suited him politically.

On the Inflation Reduction Act, the CBO gave its blessing that it would reduce the deficit.  One year after it was passed, the cost of energy credits was increased by $146 billion.  Goldeman Sachs estimates that the cost over ten years will actually be $851 billion higher.  The CBO missed by a mile. 

After the IRA was passed, the estimate of $369 billion for energy credits over a decade was revised upward. Now we have higher estimates of the cost of preserving the IRA credits for ten years. An April 26, 2023 estimate by the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) was $515 billion. An April 2023 Goldman Sachs report estimated that the IRA “will provide an estimated $1.2 trillion of incentives by 2032.”

When Democrats wanted to pretend that Obamacare would be paid for, the CBO went along and said the government would make $62 billion from taking over student loans.  The number was made up.  The cost of the government taking over student loans is massive.

Originally intended as a partial “pay for” for the ACA, CBO estimated the Direct Loan program would save taxpayers $62 billion over the next decade[.]

When Trump and the Republicans passed the tax rate cuts in 2017, the CBO went along with Democrats and claimed that the tax rate cuts would cost $1.5 trillion over ten years.  They projected that revenues would drop $1.1 trillion over ten years, but in May 2022, they revised the forecast to show they would actually be up $570 billion, even adjusting for inflation. 

Biden and other Democrats continue to lie that the tax rate cuts cost trillions. 

The CBO routinely underestimates costs of spending programs and overestimates the cost of tax rate cuts.  That can’t be a coincidence, to have that bias. 

The Congressional Budget Office’s May 2022 forecast shows that the government now expects to bring in more tax revenue in the decade following the 2017 “Trump tax cuts” than it had projected prior to the December 2017 passage of tax reform.

It doesn’t look like the tax cuts — which government scorekeepers said at the time would cost $1.5 trillion over 10 years — have been anything like the fiscal nightmare that some on the left would lead us to believe.

We are $33 trillion in debt despite politicians continually claiming that their new spending programs are paid for. 

There is no reason the media or anyone else should take CBO numbers as gospel any more than they should take climate predictions as factual.  Those numbers are also pulled from a hat. 

Image via Picryl.