Republicans Sought to Undercut an Unfavorable Analysis of the Tax Plan - Polidicks

[url]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/us/politics/republicans-joint-committee-on-taxation-estimate.html[/url] [quote]A Republican requirement that Congress consider the full cost of major legislation threatened to derail the party’s $1.5 trillion tax rewrite last week. So lawmakers went on the offensive to discredit the agency performing the analysis. In 2015, Republicans changed the budget rules in Congress so that official scorekeepers would be required to analyze the potential economic impact of major legislation when determining how it would affect federal revenues. But on Thursday, hours before they were set to vote on the largest tax cut Congress has considered in years, Senate Republicans opened an assault on that scorekeeper, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and its analysis, which showed the Senate plan would not, as lawmakers contended, pay for itself but would add $1 trillion to the federal budget deficit. Public statements and messaging documents obtained by The New York Times show a concerted push by Republican lawmakers to discredit a nonpartisan agency they had long praised. Party leaders circulated two pages of “response points” that declared “the substance, timing and growth assumptions of J.C.T.’s ‘dynamic’ score are suspect.” Among their arguments was that the joint committee was using “consistently wrong” growth models to assess the effect the tax cuts would have on hiring, wages and investment.[/quote] [quote]The attack on the joint committee and its analysis is a change from the praise Republicans have long heaped on the body, which is staffed with economists and other career bureaucrats who analyze legislation in depth. “The people who prepare our cost estimates are the best in the business,” Republicans on the House Budget Committee said on a page that has since been removed from their website, “and they’ve been working on this issue for years.” The critique is the latest example of Republican lawmakers muddying the waters on empirical research in an effort to boost their policy agendas. During the debate over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, lawmakers lashed out preemptively at the Congressional Budget Office over how many people would lose health insurance.[/quote] This bit's pretty ridiculous. The GOP tries to make it sound suspicious that the JCT released their analysis BEFORE Congress voted on the bill?? [quote]“How is it,” they wrote in their response points, “that J.C.T. found the time to produce and make public its macroeconomic analysis of the Senate bill, when it has yet to produce the same analysis of the House bill that passed weeks ago.” In a November 28 email shared with The New York Times, the committee’s chief of staff, Thomas A. Barthold, said the committee had suspended its work on the House bill dynamic score in hopes of producing an analysis of the Senate bill before a final vote. Looking at the calendar, Mr. Barthold wrote, “I made the decision to have my macro colleagues devote their time to producing a macroeconomic estimate of the Finance bill in time for the Finance Committee’s report (in this we failed) or in time for the Senate’s debate on the legislation. My colleagues and I reasoned that we could then return to complete work on H.R. 1” — the House bill — “and with good fortune have the two analyses available for a potential conference.”[/quote]

"Fake news" now applies to nonpartisan government entities when they say things Republicans don't like. :incredible:

The JCT and CBO are those posters who bring facts and arguments to a thread but everyone just clicks dumb and doesn't reply

Republicunts showing their true colors? Grass is green, republicans is corruption manifest. Fuck them, they should all just huddle together and die in a pit because that's the only good thing they can do for this earth.

The GOP have been a bunch of hypocrites on the budget for a long time.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;52946578]"Fake news" now applies to nonpartisan government entities when they say things Republicans don't like. :incredible:[/QUOTE] We're in the post-truth era, it doesn't matter what's real or not, it only matters what you can trick people into believing is real. Unfortunately it's proven itself to be extremely effective.