Charles W. Stenholm: “I oppose this amendment as a member of the Committee on the Budget. In some of the debates we have already heard today…”

“I oppose this amendment as a member of the Committee on the Budget. In some of the debates we have already heard today, it needs to be pointed out to the House we already have dynamic scoring. That is already, when it is supportable it is used. That is the way it ought to be. The idea that CBO uses only static scoring is erroneous. If dynamic scoring is a good thing, it should be a good thing in all instances, not just when the Committee on the Budget chairman finds that it will serve his purpose to use it in consultation with the ranking minority. Saying that the dynamic scoring is only informational ignores the fact that all CBO scoring is informational. It is the Committee on the Budget which ultimately decides which assumptions to use. And therein I want to close by again repeating the words that we should heed, those words of Alan Greenspan, when he testified earlier this year in the Committee on the Budget. He stated, clearly, our political process has a bias to words deficit spending, a bias toward deficit spending. Accordingly, we should be especially cautious about adopting technical scoring procedures that might, might be susceptible to overly optimistic assessments of the budgetary consequences of fiscal actions. We must avoid resting key legislative decisions on controversial estimates of revenue and outlays.”