Number crunchers on Capitol Hill have taken a new approach to scoring legislation—one that’s likely being abused to justify more tax cuts, Democrats charged on Tuesday during a contentious hearing.
The back-and-forth over how to properly estimate the cost of proposed laws occurred within the irregularly-assembled bicameral Joint Economic Committee, where Ranking Member Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) accused Republicans of using “smoke and mirrors to institutionalize ideology.”
“The dynamic scoring rule serves only one purpose, it helps Republicans reach their Holy Grail, rigging the rules so it’s easier for Congress to cut taxes,” she said during her opening remarks.
A budget resolution passed by the House and Senate in May ordered the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation—the primary non-partisan legislative accounting bodies—to consider dynamic scoring when producing final reports on legislation.
The rule-change, however, does not apply the same dynamic scoring model to discretionary expenditures, like infrastructure upkeep and construction, which is known to generate simulative macroeconomic effects. Maloney said the exception “strongly biases policy toward tax cuts.”
Dynamic scoring requires congressional forecasters to link the fiscal impact of legislative changes to the possible impact of those consequences, when determining a predicted net cost.
John Buckley, the former Chief of Staff to the Joint Committee on Taxation, warned that dynamic scoring represents a “tremendous breach” from current practices.
“I think you should be conservative in budget estimates for the same reason that corporations are not permitted to take into account the benefits of their investment when reporting to shareholders,” Buckley cautioned lawmakers, adding that “the temptation to be overly optimistic is a little too large.”
He further noted that economists rarely agree on unifying macroeconomic assumptions, thus, the parameters of any dynamic scoring system would automatically be suspect.
“You’re forcing the organization to pick one true model when the economic science hasn’t produced a single model that works,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), quoting former Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag.
Buckley, however, was the lone skeptic on the witness panel of four, which featured testimony from former Republican Senator Phil Gramm (R-Texas)—a staunch advocate of the new scoring model and the architect of legislation that led to the 2008 financial collapse.
“You can always be wrong, and we’re almost certainly going to be wrong,” he told lawmakers. “You operate with the best tools you’ve got until you get better tools, but you learn from the process.”
A GOP budget blueprint published in May with an impact assessed by a dynamic scoring model purported to reach a balanced ledger within ten years. A conventional analysis of the plan found a gaping $2 trillion hole.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D- Md.) responded by describing the GOP budget anaylsis as using “Alice in Wonderland Accounting.”
