Grover Norquist’s deluded scheme: How conservatives are using “Gruber!” to push a coup at CBO

[applegrove]

Grover Norquist’s deluded scheme: How conservatives are using “Gruber!” to push a coup at CBO

by Jim Newell at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2014/11/24/grover_norquists_deluded_scheme_how_conservatives_are_using_gruber_to_push_a_coup_at_cbo/

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While Newt Gingrich goes about trying to link Obama’s immigration actions to Gruber, another influential Republican is working to apply Weaponized Gruber to a separate area of governance. Grover Norquist, the dry, ubiquitous anti-tax advocate, is using Gruber to rally support for a coup at the Congressional Budget Office.

The current head of the CBO, which scores prospective legislation to determine, among other things, its impact on budget deficits, is a fairly evenhanded technocrat named Doug Elmendorf. His term is about to expire, and one of the interesting (albeit insidery) questions in Washington is whether the Republicans will appoint him to another term or replace him.

The decision is about more than replacing a bureaucrat, though. It’s about the extent to which the Republican Party wants to turn CBO from a non-ideological operation into an outpost of questionable conservative economic dogma. The battle is between the center-right, still tethered to mainstream (as in Keynesian) economics, and right-wing supply-siders like Norquist who think all good things come from tax cuts — and that those tax cuts will spark such extraordinary economic growth that they will offset any revenue loss projected in CBO’s “static” scoring. If a right-wing ideologue were to take over at CBO and use conservatives’ preferred “dynamic” scoring approach to, say, tax reform, incoming House Ways and Means chairman Paul Ryan would be more easily able to cut taxes and maintain revenue-neutrality without having to eliminate some of the politically popular “loopholes” in the tax code.

Norquist and fellow supply-side ideologues see their opportunity in Gruber. In some of the videos that generated controversy, Gruber has described the lengths to which Obamacare’s drafters went to secure a positive score from CBO. Republicans view this as manipulating the CBO to cover up the true, deficit-busting costs of Obamacare. For Norquist et al., this is a strike against Elmendorf’s tenure on incompetency grounds — that he “got Grubered,” and needs to go.


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