David Minge: “Well, I thank my colleague, and I would just like to comment for the benefit of our colleagues on this problem with CBO…”

“Well, I thank my colleague, and I would just like to comment for the benefit of our colleagues on this problem with CBO scoring. I think that it is sort of easy to forget that we established the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, in order to get away from inaccurate projections that were being developed back in the 1980s. There were always these rosy scenarios that we were going to have the deficit problem licked, it was just around the corner, that the deficit was going to decline. And I still remember sitting home there in Minnesota as a citizen in the community and thinking, gee, this is positive. And then at the end of the year, it was a big disappointment. It was a letdown. And it was because the White House and Congress were using all sorts of different projections and coming up with these rosy scenarios. So the Congressional Budget Office was really directed to be nonpartisan, to be objective, and it was to be beyond the influence of parties in Congress and it was to be independent of the White House, because the White House and the Office of Management and Budget had become notorious for these rosy scenarios. So in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, we had a Congressional Budget Office with some rigor, and everybody, I think even the folks at the White House, Republican or Democrat, were respecting the projections from the Congressional Budget Office, or its estimates, its so-called scoring, as being the most accurate.”