Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Looking at the world, it is increasingly clear that there is no hope for responsible governance in America until the Republican Party as currently constituted vanishes from the earth.

Austin Frakt:

Fuzzy math | The Incidental Economist: There have been a lot of charges and counter-charges of fuzzy math out there.... As important as defending the CBO is (and it is), it just isn’t that interesting to me. I don’t like to fight or repeat myself.

Actually, I mostly find the CBO scoring argument sad. There really is no hope for progress of any kind if we can’t even agree to abide by the budget scoring of a non-partisan office. If you don’t think that office is operating in good faith or don’t like the rules by which it operates, then that’s where the debate should be. Tell me some other way to score bills that everyone will agree to and abide by. Better, tell it to your colleagues across the aisle. Figure out the rules. AND THEN STICK BY THEM AND STOP WHINING WHEN THE BALL BOUNCES THE OTHER WAY!!!

I am not impressed with selective second guessing of the work produced by an office so established. I don’t want to hear it from Republicans. I don’t want to hear it from Democrats. I don’t want to hear it from the Tea Party. If my own mother said such things I’d have some firm words with her (respectfully, kindly, but firm). And I love my mother!

Like Jon Cohn, I may sound upset. I am, but only because I care. I don’t want to be upset by one party or the other. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t get a rush. It’s not why I pay attention to politics. I would love nothing better than to see everyone settle down and get to work–good faith, honest, hard work–addressing the problems of this nation, including health care coverage, cost, and quality. I don’t expect we’ll agree on solutions or even what the problems are. But I damn well expect we’ll honor the outcomes of the process we’ve agreed to follow. If we can’t do that, we don’t have a government. We have a bunch of children. I don’t put my children in charge of anything nearly as important as the nation’s health care system. Nor should you.

One more thing, Cohn wrote, “This relentless effort to discredit the Affordable Care Act’s budgeting has been the equivalent of a full employment for folks like Austin, Ezra, and me. For that, I guess, I’m grateful.”

I’m not. It may keep me preoccupied, but I don’t get paid for this. I do it because I care. I want people to understand. I want to be part of the solution. I do love this country, almost as much as my own mother. For country and mom, I pledge not to bash the CBO or to second guess their estimates. Care to join me?

And Jon Chait is if anything even more unhappy:

Charles Krauthammer Laughs At Arithmetic: Charles Krauthammer writes:

Suppose someone - say, the president of United States - proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I've got a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield a savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion. He'd be laughed out of town.

Uh... why? As I noted the other day, "Conservatives think the notion that a piece of legislation can spend some money to cover the uninsured, while simultaneously cutting spending and raising taxes by some greater sum,  so that the overall bill reduces the deficit, is conceptually absurd." It would literally be impossible to craft a bill that provided for universal coverage and also reduced the deficit and have Republicans accept its accounting as valid.

Krauthammer holds this belief so strongly that he presents a straightforward arithmetic property -- $770 billion in revenues minus $540 billion in spending equals $230 billion in lower deficits -- as not just wrong but hilariously wrong: Why, they're increasing spending while increases taxes more, while claiming this will reduce the deficit! The morans!

Indeed, Krauthammer deems the "$770 billion > $540 billion" scoring method so self-evidently silly he doesn't even bother to refute it. The paragraph I quoted is all the refutation he deems necessary.

Now, increasing spending by $540 billion and increasing taxes by $770 billion is a ridiculous way to reduce the size of government. But, despite Republican efforts to conflate the two, the size of government is not the same thing as the debt, as even Milton Friedman recognized.

So Krauthammer, convinced that $540 billion is clearly larger than $770 billion, proceeds to recycle some familiar Republican talking points attempting to cast doubt on the CBO score. His shining example is the endlessly repeated saw that the law combines six years of benefits with ten years of revenue in order to appear revenue-neutral:

Most glaringly, the entitlement it creates - government-subsidized health insurance for 32 million Americans - doesn't kick in until 2014. That was deliberately designed so any projection for this decade would cover only six years of expenditures - while that same 10-year projection would capture 10 years of revenue. With 10 years of money inflow vs. six years of outflow, the result is a positive - i.e., deficit-reducing - number. Surprise.

That would be bad if true. But it's not.... The benefits phase in slowly as do the revenues. Krauthammer's six years of benefits/ten years of revenue canard would mean that, once fully phased in, the costs dramatically exceed the revenue. That isn't the case. The law's effect deficit-reduction effect increases over the last ten years.

Health care analysts have pointed this out over and over. Yet conservatives like Krauthammer keep repeating these debunked claims. Either Krauthammer lives so deep within the right's misinformation feedback loop that he has never heard any refutation of his false claims, or else he simply doesn't care what's true.

Anyway, Krauthammer frames his entire column as a plea for concern with the deficit. If this were truly his concern, as Austin Frakt points out, why don't Republicans propose to repeal just the coverage expansions in the PPACA, and keep all the cost savings? Or even just some of them? if they refuse to violate their religious opposition to tax hikes, they could just keep in place the Medicare cuts and repeal the coverage expansions. that would undeniably shrink the deficit, and the size of government. But they won't even consider that. The bad faith at work here is just staggering.