Politicizing the Budget Process

I assume and hope this would be vetoed by the president Obama, but the effort itself is telling:

Tilting the Budget Process to the G.O.P.,by Bruce Bartlett, Commentary, NY Times: The House of Representatives voted last week to tilt the budgetary process in favor of the Republican economic agenda. On Feb. 3, the House passed ... the Pro-Growth Budgeting Act of 2012. Innocuous on the surface, its long-term purpose is to institutionalize Republican economic policy into the very fabric of budgetary analysis.

The legislation would require that the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation do a “dynamic” analysis of major legislation.... The dynamic calculation would be supplementary and not replace the current official scoring methodology, but the obvious long-term goal is to require official revenue estimates to incorporate “Laffer curve” effects in order to make it easier to cut taxes and harder to raise them...

As the budget deficit increasingly inhibits Republicans’ tax-cutting, they are planning ahead for tax cuts that they will insist are costless because they will so massively increase growth. ... My concern is that the Republican effort is just a smokescreen to incorporate phony-baloney factors into revenue estimates to justify unlimited tax cutting. How soon before the C.B.O. is required to incorporate estimates from the right-wing Heritage Foundation in its calculations? ... Republicans don’t really care about accurate revenue estimates; they just want them to show that tax cuts pay for themselves...

Confirmation of this fear is the fact that the House-passed legislation would not require a dynamic estimate for appropriations bills, no matter how large. Republicans want the world to know that tax cuts expand real G.D.P., the capital stock and labor supply, but if spending has any such effect they don’t want anyone to know. Implicitly, Republicans want everyone to think that spending never raises growth because it’s their dogma.

But in the real world, everyone knows that government investments in the national highway system, medical and other scientific research, and other programs unquestionably add to growth. ...

Over the last three years, we have seen Republicans politicize every aspect of policy making... It is reasonable to assume that the Republicans’ effort to alter the budget process is just another aspect of their goal to politicize policy and institutionalize their philosophy.

I don't have any problem with the CBO incorporating growth effects into its estimates of the impact of policy (for both spending and taxes), but the CBO should not be forced to adopt a particular macroeconomic model or methodology for evaluating policy. That's a recipe for partisan analysis -- we see that already with infrastructure excluded from the calculations -- where a neutral voice is needed. As I said above, I expect the legislation would be vetoed by president Obama, but a president Romney would be a different story.