Congressional Budget Office

As I explain in my column from today's Roll Call, it says everything you need to know that, even by today's federal budget standards, Newt Gingrich's recent verbal attack on the Congressional Budget Office was absurd.

Take a look.

Newt Gingrich Wants to Kill the CBO Messenger

Former Speaker and current GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich might well have said that he wants to kill his personal physician because he didn’t like being told his blood pressure was too high.

But that’s the equivalent of what Gingrich did say during a recent debate, when he made it clear that the Congressional Budget Office has to be eliminated if health care reform is going to be repealed.

My column from today's Roll Call explains why the latest projection from the Congressional Budget Office showing the current year deficit will be $1.5 trillion, which was released last Wednesday, wasn't the big story many said it was.  In fact, it wasn't a story at all.

New CBO Deficit Number Is ‘Dog Bites Man’ Story

By Stan Collender
Roll Call Contributing Writer

I realize that it’s only February and that a great many federal budget debates, votes and cliffhangers are still ahead. But even though the year is young, the topic that received so much media attention last week — the Congressional Budget Office’s new $1.5 trillion estimate for the fiscal 2011 federal deficit — may well be the biggest budget non-story of the year.

In previous years we would have been breaking out the champagne on this news: The monthly budget review released yesterday by the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the federal budget deficit fell by $125 billion from 2009 to 2010.  This by far is the biggest one-year nominal drop in the deficit that has ever occurred.

There were two primary reasons there was no cheering yesterday.

First, it's not at all clear that reducing the deficit was the correct fiscal policy given the slow growth in the U.S. economy.

Second, in the current political atmosphere even a 50 percent reduction would have still left lots of room for those who want to do so to use the deficit as an issue.  To those folks, the $125 billion reduction simply isn't as important as the $1.29 trillion deficit that's available for campaign fodder.

In other words, the $125 billion reduction in the deficit was both too much and not enough.

It's not at all clear whether Republicans or Democrats will end up being the political winner of health care reform, but it is absolutely certain that the Congressional Budget Office came out of the debate in a far better and more highly esteemed position than when it began.

At some point during the health care debate: