Yesterday, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget issued a statement condemning “current policy baseline” scoring, an accounting method that scores extending current tax cuts as “baseline,” which would obscure their cost. Such an approach was recently proposed in an op-ed by Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID). CRFB’s statement oddly says that “[t]here will undoubtedly be efforts to pretend that extending the tax cuts is free,” framing it as a hypothetical rather than something specifically proposed by a specific Senator just a few days prior.
Why is CRFB so solicitous of Senator Crapo? Would they be similarly careful to avoid angering, say, Senator Bernie Sanders?
Interestingly, the statement also links to a CRFB blog—to support the statement that “[e]xperts on the left, right, and center agree that the coming expirations should be used as an opportunity for fiscally responsible tax reform relative to a current law baseline—” but the blog simply doesn’t say that. The word “baseline” doesn’t even appear once.
If CRFB doesn’t understand how to provide supporting evidence for a claim, why should we believe they have special insight into the macroeconomy of the United States?