In recent weeks, congressional Republicans and the White House have repeatedly gone after the Congressional Budget Office, not because the nonpartisan analysts did something wrong, but because the CBO has provided the public with facts that Donald Trump and his allies don’t like.
Indeed, the offensive couldn’t be any more straightforward: The budget office produced objective data that makes the Republican Party’s domestic policy megabill — the inaptly named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — look like a far-right disaster, so the president and GOP officials have scrambled to discredit the source of independent information.
Some of these efforts have been more embarrassing than others. The Washington Post reported:
Like many congressional Republicans and members of the Trump administration already have, Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) on Thursday attacked the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office for its scoring of the GOP’s massive tax and immigration bill, arguing that the CBO’s estimates are inaccurate. In a video shared on X, Scott accused the office … of being wrong in its scoring of tax cuts implemented in the 1930s and the 1960s.
There was, however, a rather glaring problem with the senator’s pitch: The Congressional Budget Office wasn’t created until 1974. When Scott said, “Wrong then. Wrong Now,” he was, unfortunately, wrong.
And it’d be an unfortunate example of a senator taking aim at the budget office, but stumbling over inconvenient facts, if we were to stop there. But as it turns out, that wasn’t the only problem with his pitch.
Scott claimed, for example, “In 2017, the CBO said the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would increase the deficit and the debt by trillions of dollars. What happened? They were wrong.” Actually, no, the CBO was right: The Republicans’ 2017 package of tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations really did increase the deficit and the debt by trillions of dollars. That’s not a matter of opinion; it’s simply what happened.
Moments later, in the same video, the senator said CBO analysts “were wrong on the Mellon tax cuts in the 1930s.” The obvious problem with this is the fact that the CBO didn’t exist in the 1930s. However, the less obvious problem is that the Mellon tax cuts were approved in the 1920s, not the 1930s, shortly before the Great Depression.
But wait, there’s more. Also in the minute-long video, Scott said the CBO was also “wrong on the Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s,” which is sort of true, but not in the way the South Carolinian meant. As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s Marc Goldwein noted, the CBO “actually overestimated revenue collection in the 1980s,” which was the opposite of the point the senator was trying to make.
In his next breath, Scott said of the CBO, “When have they been right? I don’t know either.” Actually, I do know: The office’s track record on forecasting future budget deficits has been pretty impressive in recent years, whether or not the senator is aware of this.
For good measure, let’s not skip past the fact that Scott went on to say, “The Laffer Curve is right. … It has always worked; I think it always will work.” The Laffer Curve is a creation of Art Laffer, arguably the nation’s preeminent cheerleader for a ridiculous idea: Tax cuts are self-financing. He’s spent decades telling policymakers they can slash tax rates, especially for the wealthy, and the tax breaks necessarily pay for themselves through stronger economic growth and increased revenue. Republicans have repeatedly tried to govern with this idea in mind, and they’ve always failed. Critics of the Laffer Curve have consistently been proven right, and proponents of the discredited idea have consistently been proven wrong. Scott really ought to know all of this. He is, after all, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and a member of the Senate Finance Committee. But despite these many glaring, factual errors, the Republican senator not only put this video online, he left it online even after its errors were exposed. It reflects an indifference toward reality that has become a staple of the GOP’s offensive against the Congressional Budget Office.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Latest Post
Recommended
