What?!?! This is silly!
A friend of mine has been claiming this, saying the congressional budget office estimates the deficit will be cut by around 118 billion dollars through 2010-2019. Here’s the source of the info: (http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/113xx/doc11355/hr4872.pdf page 2)
From what I’ve learned about AE here, this doesn’t sound right. Can anyone explain the rationale for these projections? (Or why they think they’re right!)
Sure, that is easy. Assume that all provider are defrauding the government. This is factually correct as there are volumes of regulations may of which counter one another so every provider is basically breaking some regulation. Then assume that if you make the providers pay a fine then you get this money for free (Except of course the cost to prosecute but someone else pays that.). So these estimators just add up the total amount of expected fines to be collected in the future and you get 118 billion. Of course the providers have congress critters who bring a lot of heat on congress who then complains to the investigators who then back off or more likely change the regulations by adding more of them. Then once the heat is off the investigators repeat. Of course the 118 billion is never collected by that is someone elses (read tax payers) problem.
That sounds like a rather dubious explanation and I highly doubt that is how their assessment arrived at those numbers. I tried following the references in the CBO document to find methodology and how they did arrive at these numbers (which I have no doubt are bulls**t) but I’ve run out of time before class, and am not very good at navigating government databases unfortunately.
If anyone is better at this than I and has the time to dig up their references and link them I’d be quite curious to see what they attribute these net deficit reductions to.
No one at the CBO has ever had any real world experience. Seriously, look up the CBO, look at the careers of the directors, and laugh. its a bunch of intellectual shills there to make the state look good.
See here.
My thoughts exactly!
Thanks for the link