About AJ DiCintio
A.J. DiCintio is a Featured Writer for The New Media Journal. He first exercised his polemical skills arguing with friends on
the street corners of the working class neighborhood where he grew up.
Retired from teaching, he now applies those skills, somewhat honed and
polished by experience, to social/political affairs.
Given all the hullabaloo directed at
Senator Max Baucus as he and his Democratic allies anticipated cost
estimates of his healthcare bill with the nervous agitation exhibited by
actors who fidget all night as they await reviews of a hopelessly bad play,
Americans are now aware of the Congressional Budget Office.
In fact, there was so much hullabalooing that the public has also come
to know that Washington’s politicians regard the CBO as the "gold
standard” when it comes to letting everyone know how much the Federal
Government will take in or how deeply one of its programs will dig into
taxpayers’ pockets or add to the debt already breaking taxpayers’ backs.
Problem is, anyone who believes the gold standard stuff suffers from a
severe disturbance of the mind that, for some crazy reason, still
remains absent from the American Psychiatric Association’s Manual of
Mental Disorders.
So, what is the truth about an agency Congress has not only saddled with
the task of predicting the future but also with the requirement that it
complete its tasks with numbers and assumptions provided by the
"honorable members” who perform their dirty labors under the dome of the
U.S. Capitol?
To answer that question, you first must know why, in 1974, Congress was
all in a sweat to get out of the cost prediction business. The reason is
this: By that year, its members realized they needed a fall guy to take
the hit for their Medicare predictions.
You see, when the Medicare bill passed in ’65, the House Ways and Means
Committee told the public that by 1990, the hospital insurance portion
of Medicare (Part A) would cost about $9 billion annually.
Then, in ’67, when Medicare went into effect, Ways and Means announced
that by 1990, the entire Medicare program would cost about $12 billion a
year.
But Members of Congress were aware of the relevant data regarding
Medicare. And therefore they huffed and puffed Fall Guy into life.
And sure enough, in 1990, it was the CBO that had the pleasure of
announcing Part A of Medicare cost $67 billion for the year and
the entire Medicare program $110 billion. (Data thanks to the
Heritage Foundation.)
So, too, according to the Heritage Foundation, in 1992 it was the CBO
that had to tell the public the amount states paid to hospitals that
served large numbers of Medicaid and uninsured patients was $17 billion,
instead of the $1 billion Congress had estimated just five years
earlier.
Moreover, through the nineties, it was the CBO chief sweating in the
limelight as he explained the lowball miscalculations (actually,
"congressional lies”) involving changes to Medicare’s home care benefit,
the addition of a catastrophic coverage benefit to Medicare, and the
institution of the SCHIP program.
But has the gold standard agency done better in the new millennium?
You can decide for yourself after reading the following facts, beginning
with a quote that appeared on the CBO website in January, 2001:
"...the total [Federal] surplus will reach $281 billion in 2001. Such
surpluses are projected to rise in the future, approaching $889 billion
in 2011 and accumulating to $5.6 trillion over the 2002-2011 period.”
How accurate was the CBO’s prediction?
Well, during his tenure, Bush accumulated not surpluses but deficits
totaling $4.9 trillion, thereby increasing the total national
debt from $5.7 trillion to $10.6 trillion.
Moreover, Obama has made Bush look like a deficit piker, having run up a
shortfall of $1.4 trillion in his first year in office (on his
way to adding $10 trillion to the debt over the next decade).
As a result, if Obama runs up deficits of a trillion/year in FY’s 2010
and 2011, the following exclamation will be in order:
"Mamma mia, CBO! From a prediction of $5.6 trillion in surpluses
to a reality of $8.3 trillion of debt! The old folks used to describe
that kind of a blunder as stupefacente!”
Some, of course, will argue that 2001 was an anomaly for the CBO.
However, such people are well advised to eat their words instead of
speaking them because 2003 brought more ugly guesswork.
The CBO got off to a very bad start that year when it was sucked into
making a prediction that once again reveals how right Sherman was when
he warned, "Every attempt to make war easy . . . will result in
humiliation and disaster.”
To grasp the tragic, embarrassing nature of the estimate as it pertains
to the moral and intellectual monstrosity that is "limited war,” you
need only read the following question and answer found in a 1/19/03
transcript that appears on the website of the U.S. Department of
Defense, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs).
Q: Mr. Secretary, on Iraq, how much money do you think the Department
of Defense would need to pay for a war with Iraq?
Rumsfeld: Well, the Office of Management and Budget, has come up come
up with a number that’s something under $50 billion for the cost. How
much of that would be the U.S. burden, and how much would be other
countries, is an open question.
It was also in ’03 that the Bush Medicare drug benefit was enacted, with
the CBO agreeing with the administration that over ten years, the
program would cost about $400 billion.
However, by February, 2005, eleven months before the plan would go into
effect, the administrator of Medicare was acknowledging "that the
cumulative cost of the program between 2006 and 2015 will reach $1.2
trillion” or, perhaps, just "$720 billion.” (Quotations from Ceci
Connolly and Mike Allen, Washington Post.)
Yes, as the augurs of the Roman Forum or Stonehenge would tell us if
they could, trying to predict the future is a nasty, mostly uncertain,
unforgiving business.
They would also tell us that when the swill of politics is dumped into
the mix, the augur’s job becomes impossible.
That’s why common sense folks didn’t lose a wink of sleep last week
waiting for the CBO’s Baucus bill estimate.
But they are likely to lose a whole lot of sleep if the most liberal
president and Congress in the nation’s history pass into law their
version of healthcare reform.
That sleeplessness will occur in part because political garbage will
turn CBO cost estimates into a very unfunny joke.
Most of it, however, will arise from a realization that the political
creatures who populate the level of government most remote from the
people have completely wrapped their rapacious tentacles around an
industry that literally deals with issues of life and death.
