USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!!

[Peter Lemkin]

AUGUST 5, 2017 | CHRISTINE CAPOZZIELLO

CONSERVATIVES LAY SIEGE TO CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE

Photo credit: Lubos Houska/Public Domain(CC0)
Republicans spent the first half of this year trying to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Their efforts were stymied in part by Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections showing that all of their proposals would result in millions of additional Americans being uninsured and a sharp reduction in Medicaid funding.
GOP lawmakers and the White House, unhappy with the so-called CBO scores, reacted by attacking the non-partisan entity. Last month, for example, the White House Twitter account posted a video questioning the validity of a report issued by the CBO. That video, which was found to be misleading at best, suggests the CBO used faulty numbers to reach a conclusion that ultimately did not bode well for Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
Some conservative Republicans in the House went a step further and sought to slash CBO's funding.
While most Americans will have heard about these projections, not all of them know what CBO is and does.
The Congressional Budget Office has been active since 1975, producing independent economic analyses and projections based on proposed legislation.
According to its website, CBO hires based solely on "professional competence with no regard to political affiliation." The agency was created through the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. That act "reasserted the Congress's constitutional control over the budget by establishing new procedures for controlling impoundments and by instituting a formal process through which the Congress could develop, coordinate, and enforce its own budgetary priorities independently of the President."
In the past, depending on whether a CBO score helped or hurt their causes, lawmakers from both parties have criticized or defended the agency. However, in the current hyper-partisan climate, it appears as though the attacks have reached a new level.
In response to the recent criticism, all eight previous CBO directors, in a display of solidarity, issued a joint letter to the Senate defending the agency.

AUGUST 6, 2017 | CELIA WEXLER AND DONKEYHOTEY

CONSERVATIVES DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW THE COST OF HEALTH CARE REPEAL

Let the war on math begin. Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy (CC BY-SA 2.0) See complete attribution below.
Usually, the phrase "kill the messenger" is a bit of overwrought hyperbole.
But that was not the case late last month when House Republicans almost did just that. The House considered amendments to a spending bill that could have gutted that very inconvenient messenger, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Conservative Republicans and the Trump White House were apoplectic when CBO delivered the bad news on their various proposals to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. The agency predicted that the proposals would cause tens of millions of people to join the ranks of the uninsured. CBO's headline-grabbing estimates were a major factor in ginning up massive opposition to the health care bills.
The reasonable reaction to the bad numbers would have been to retool the proposals. But politics is far from reasonable these days. Instead, the White House released an ad and an op-ed insisting that CBO's numbers were wrong, a claim not bolstered by the fact that the ad misspelled the word, "inaccurate." Fact-checkers soon questioned the administration's other challenges to the agency's estimates, adding context and defending CBO's prediction about the number of uninsured.
When those attacks pretty much backfired, a few Republican conservatives intensified their opposition, challenging the agency's very existence. They offered amendments to a spending bill that would have eviscerated CBO's budget of under $50 million by $15 million or more, and outsourced much of its work to private think tanks.
Republican firebrand Rep. Mark Meadows (NC) claimed that CBO's role should be one of aggregating cost estimates from the conservative Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute and the more progressive Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. Meadows charged that CBO was "the one group that makes a weatherman's 10-day forecast look accurate."
The attacks on CBO are not business as usual in Washington. The nonpartisan office was created in 1974 to serve Congress, by helping lawmakers understand the effects their proposals would have on the federal budget.
Those impact estimates have become a fundamental part of the legislative process. Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle rely on a CBO "score" to inform their proposals. They often grumble about the CBO score their pet ideas receive, and may sometimes challenge some of CBO's assumptions, but they appreciate and respect the process.
Meadows may have been surprised by the outrage his attack on CBO provoked. Every living former CBO director, both Republican and Democratic, wrote a letter to congressional leaders defending the agency in no uncertain terms, pointing out its 42-year history of providing nonpartisan budget estimates to Congress.
Nonprofit advocates also weighed in. The Project on Government Oversight, which trains congressional staff to do more effective oversight, predicted that gutting CBO "would send a chilling message to all other independent offices, such as the Congressional Research Service or the Government Accountability Office." R Street, a Republican-leaning free-market advocate, teamed up with Demand Progress, a progressive policy advocate, to urge Congress to fully fund the agency.
In the end, the pressure worked. The House defeatedthese attempts to gut the CBO. For now.
But it is difficult to imagine that the prospect of its imminent demise did not affect the folks at this small nonpartisan office. Its staffers well know the perils of trying to give Congress impartial information.
After all, in 1995, another nonpartisan agency created to help Congress bit the dust when then-Speaker Newt Gingrich found its fact-based work not worth even its tiny budget. Republicans and Democrats banded together to try to save the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), formed to deliver advice to Congress on emerging scientific and technical issues. But their efforts failed.
The OTA has been missed. Let's hope some measure of sanity in Washington prevails and CBO will not suffer the same fate.