What with everything else going on, a seemingly technical note from Richard Kogan at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities may be slipping under the radar. But this is really important.
As Kogan notes, the Congressional Budget Office has released its latest set of long-run budget projections, declaring that “The long-term outlook for the federal budget has worsened dramatically over the past several years.” And this is quite scary — not the projections, but the fact that CBO would say this. Because as Kogan points out, the budget office’s own numbers contradict its claims.
The key point is that CBO makes what Kogan rightly calls an apples-to-oranges comparison, comparing pre-2010 current-law estimates that assumed that the Bush tax cuts would expire in full with later projections that incorporate their partial extension (as well as a related issue involving the Alternative Minimum Tax.) This doesn’t mark a real deterioration in the outlook, and it certainly doesn’t indicate out of control policy. In fact, the outlook isn’t particularly scary.
Oh, and as Kogan noted in another paper, CBO’s estimates are almost surely too pessimistic on interest rates, so that the long-run budget outlook is even less scary than it appears.
So what’s going on here? I can’t believe that CBO staff were confused about these issues. What it looks like, I’m sorry to say, is the first indication that the new, GOP-dominated CBO is in fact going to be politicized, engaging in deficit scare tactics when that suits the majority, pro-tax-cut scoring, and more.