CBO, We Have A Problem

Sometime back, I wrote, not with admiration, about the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the 'scoring' rules that our Congress has burdened it with. Essentially, they don't adjust for inflation and they don't do dynamic scoring. Or, said differently, they are required to treat each bill as its own micro-economy, forecast for only 10 years, and  generally not reflect inflation. This approach allows the Congress to manipulate bills so as to score them as cost-neutral, or even as cost-savers, when in reality, everyone, including both Congress and the CBO, know that they are going to cost us a lot of money.

How much money? Does the number 15 trillion mean anything to you? The federal debt, according to the debt clock is now just above that number. It's a big number. It has 12 zeroes in it. It also has two other digits to the left of those zeroes.

I would posit that these rules and Congress' manipulation of these rules are responsible for a significant portion of that 15 trillion. In fact, and I'm just guessing (no calculator or spreadsheet in action here, not even any mental math), if I had to choose an over/under amount, more than half of that 15 trillion in debt has accumulated from flawed scoring.

I'm not saying that the CBO does poor math, in fact, they are very good at it. What I am saying is that the constraints that they are required to follow have caused the United States to underprice the costs of various bills by a really big number and I am guessing (that means that I don't know, but my brain now fully caffeinated for the day has estimated) that this number in the aggregate is more than half of 15 trillion dollars!

When I try to hide my political biases, I usually work in alphabetical order and I'm going to do that here. In this case, the Democrats are incredibly guilty of having gamed this system ... and they know it. In this case, the Republicans are incredibly guilty of having gamed this system ... and they know it. Most of the public doesn't know it. There has never been a public outcry. There should be.

So, what does this have to do with employee benefits? The good folks at the Employee Benefits Research Institute (EBRI) have a nice little chart (actually it's not so little) that they call Employee Benefit Tax Expenditures -- White House Fiscal Year 2011 Budget Estimates. It shows that the tax expenditure (that's a fancy name for the amount of deductions that people and corporations get on their taxes, either through deductions or through tax exemptions) for employer contributions for health care benefits in FY 2011 is in the neighborhood of $175 billion and  similarly, for employment based retirement plans, it's about $110 billion. That's $285 billion in total. The mortgage interest deduction for the same year is about $105 billion. So, employee benefits are a really big culprit.

I bet my readers know that those numbers go up every year. Of course, they do, inflation makes them go up, doesn't it? Suppose we adjust for inflation. Then, what happens? Well, EBRI can help us out with that as well. Here is the url for a spreadsheet (http://www.ebri.org/pdf/publications/books/databook/Table 5.2 Inflation Adjust.xls), and you'll have to copy and paste this one, that shows what happens when we adjust for inflation. Look at the spreadsheet. Find me a major element that decreases on an inflation-adjusted basis. You can't do it, can you? And, therein lies a problem of just enormous proportions.

The 10-year cost of many of these bills is understated because the CBO isn't allowed to use assumptions that faithfully project the cost. And, because cost increases tend to (read that as virtually always) significantly outstrip inflation, using virtually any 10-year cost projections for a bill that is expected to last for a long time (think Social Security or Medicare, for example) represents among the most significant frauds ever perpetuated on the American taxpayers.

Yes, I said it. It's a fraud.

It's time for the taxpayers to stand up to Congress.

I haven't used song lyrics in this blog for a while, but I'm going to go back to the Vietnam War era for this one. With thanks to Jefferson Airplane,

got a revolution got to revolution 
Who will take it from you 
We will and who are we 
We are volunteers of america

Change volunteers to taxpayers and ...