Liberal Values Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

Conservatives tend to begin with their position and then work backwards to twist the evidence to try to support their position. We often see this in their distortions of science with regards to evolution and climate change. In the case of health care reform they repeat the arguments fed to them by the insurance industry while ignoring any objective data. When the Congressional Budget Office put out a favorable report on the current legislation conservatives began to attack the validity of the CBO’s report.

The reality is that when the CBO is off it historically is on the side of underestimating cost savings. This is because new and untried cost savings measures cannot be scored by the CBO resulting in them being left out of the calculations.

Conservatives now ignore the conclusions of the Congressional Budget Office as they did when the CBO disputed the claims of conservatives about the effects of the pubic option. Conservatives ignored the CBO’s warnings about the cost of the Iraq war. However, when a CBO report of an earlier draft of health care legislation showed that cost savings  would not fund health care reform, conservatives were quick to quote this report. Once the legislation was tweaked and reports showed the plan to be fiscally sound, conservatives no longer respected the results of the CBO.

Think Progress points out that Michael Steele and the Republican National Committee now claim that “you can’t believe the numbers” from the CBO. However, they also note that Steele and the RNC have cited CBO numbers to support their arguments. This was done as recently as March 5 to criticize Obama’s proposed bank fee.

Simon Owens provides additional examples of how Conservative bloggers loved the CBO before they hated it.

Ezra Klein writes more on the CBO estimates.