Ezra Klein nailed the impact of the Congressional Budget Office's apparent decision that a major part of the what could be included in health care will not be scored as being on budget.
Klein is right: CBO's opposite decision during the Clinton administration literally killed any chance of health care happening that year.
Add this decision to the fact that Congress has decided to allow the budget reconciliation rules to be used to avoid a Senate filibuster on a health care bill and its clear that it's far more likely that something could be adopted this year than seemed possible on Inauguration Day.
(I've been trying to find a clip of an extraordinary interview Bryant Gumbel did with ex-Senator Tom Daschle in 1994 on Today about the impact of the CBO decision. The interview is classic. Gumbel keeps hammering Daschle while Daschle continually refuses to admit that what CBO said was negative. Please let me know if you know where a copy of the interview is available.)
Meanwhile, former acting CBO Director (and all around smart guy) Donald Marron also talked about CBO's decision in his new blog, which is definitely worth bookmarking.
Here's the CBO issue brief and CBO Director Doug Elmendorf's own blog post on the subject.
The same thing goes on in
The same thing goes on in local government. They may not call it that but it does happen. Whenever a local government allows a Corporate firm to get a tax free incentive to bring
their plant to a town that is bribery. I'm sure many small town or city politicians who have dreams of higher office consider how these firms that they allow into their communities for these tax incentives, will eventually want to rep
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