Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

Bucco, again I find it almost unbeleiveable that you somehow find a few words in each of my posts that you believe to be a defense of your hated and distrusted president. Oh well, to each his own.

Here's another that I'm sure you'll interpret as a defense of the POTUS. The Congressional Budget Office "scores" legislation (determines it's cost) based solely on the assumptions provided to them by the Congress itself. The CBO by law is not permitted to introduce its own assumptions, or "maybes" as you call them. I suspect that your implication is that the any favorable scoring results from the president's assumptions. That is incorrect. The CBO can only score based on the assumptions provided to them by the House of Representatives. The POTUS or even the minority party has little to say about what assumptions are given to the CBO.

So in the case of ObamaCare, that's why the public sees wild swings in the scoring of legislation. It depends on who has the majority. When ObamaCare was passed, the Democrats had the majority and told the CBO what assumptions to use. Now that the GOP has assumed the majority in the 2010 mid-term elections, they give the CBO new assumptions (self-serving politically presumably), and the CBO comes up with wildly different projections.

An example might be the "repeal ObamaCare" bill recently passed by the House. It was only two pages long, saying little more than "repeal the ACA bill"...no detail, no replacements. Yet the assumptions they provided the CBO basically said that the "savings" would amount to the projected costs from the scoring that the GOP had re-done when they assumed the majority. There were no assumptions on any healthcare cost increases that might result from reversing the ACA bill.

All this proves, unfortunately, is that "figures don't lie, but liars figure". In this case the liars are in the House of Representatives, not the White House.