Forbes – The Congressional Budget Office issued a report this week analyzing an earlier version of the Senate bill. CBO estimated the legislation would reduce the federal deficit by $175 billion over the first ten years. Backers of the legislation quickly trumpeted the report as an additional reason to support the bill. However, both the context and the big picture are missing from the CBO report.
To begin to put the numbers in context, it is worth pointing out that the estimated improvement in the budget amounts to less than one-half of one percent of federal spending and somewhere around two percent of the budget deficit. In other words, while $175 billion sounds big because it is a ten year total it is really too small to be meaningful. Essentially this is a rounding error. [Read More]
