Mike Johnson's bogus attack on CBO's score of the 2017 tax bill

[Zorro]

The House speaker says the CBO missed by $1 trillion, but even the CBO couldn’t predict a pandemic.

“They’ve [Congressional Budget Office] always been off. By way of example, they were off on their projections of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in the first Trump administration by $1 trillion. The problem is they do not use what we call dynamic scoring. What that means in layman’s terms is they don’t give us any credit for the extraordinary economic growth that will be spurred along by this bill.”

— House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), interviewed on Fox News, May 29

The CBO is a nonpartisan agency that provides official forecasts on the impact of legislation. (The current director, Phillip Swagel, served in the George W. Bush administration.) Lawmakers love to cite it when it gives them a number they like (as Johnson did only a few days before this interview) and attack it when the number causes political problems.

In this instance, Johnson is upset that the House’s main legislative vehicle — the One Big Beautiful Bill of tax and spending cuts — was deemed to add trillions to the national debt. President Donald Trump and White House officials have also attacked the CBO for its estimates on the bill, which are produced with the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation.

But the CBO is not alone. Similar conclusions have been reached from right- and left-leaning organizations, including the Tax Foundation, the Penn-Wharton Budget Model, the Manhattan Institute and the Center for American Progress.

We’re going to focus on Johnson’s claim that the CBO blew its forecast on Trump’s 2017 tax bill. It’s a nonsense claim that somehow dings the CBO for failing to predict a pandemic, the resulting sky-high inflation and an immigration surge.

Johnson is also wrong that the CBO does not do dynamic scoring in its forecasts. At the request of Congress, it does — but that analysis of the bill has not been delivered yet. He may not like that result either. Penn Wharton’s dynamic scoring showed an even bigger increase in the deficit than its conventional score, in part because it determined the bill would encourage higher-income workers to work fewer hours, resulting in lower tax revenue.

https://wapo.st/3Hmw8fv

[House of Roberts]

1. Republicans never achieve 'extraordinary economic growth' with any of their scam tax cuts.

That is a proven lie every time they tell it.