Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to a claim that
this deficit reduction is achieved only through a
business-as-usual Washington budget gimmick: paying for
just a few years of costs with many more years of savings.
This charge is simply false—and let’s get the facts
straight.
...
Third, this is not a budget gimmick. The purpose the
tried-and-true gimmick described above is to make a
proposal that adds to long-term deficits appear fiscally
responsible. But if that were the course we were taking,
we would expect to see a large fiscal hole at the end of
the first decade and larger and larger deficits in the
second decade. Instead, over the long-term, the savings
under the President’s plan are expected to grow faster
than the costs. So, when the Congressional Budget Office
is done with its scoring, we expect it will find that the
President’s plan reduces deficits by roughly $100 billion
in the first 10 years and roughly $1 trillion in the
decade after that. In other words, health reform should
reduce the deficit by growing amounts over the long-term.
Put simply: Health reform will reduce the deficit in this
decade, and it will reduce the deficit by even more
thereafter. There’s no gimmick in that.
A program which was supposed to save $86 billion is declared insolvent and discontinued before it was put into production, by the people who were intimately involved in designing it. They pushed hard to pass the bill and made statements like Orszag did above.
In the interest of being nonpartisan, I think that history will look on these kinds of statements in the same way we now look on Colin Powell's presentation to the UN in the context of the runup to Iraq. At best the WMDs/savings just weren't there, and it was an honest mistake. At worst, they lied. Somewhere in the middle one might call them guilty of wishful thinking and exaggeration. But whatever you call it, it's hard to continue to maintain that those who claimed the presence of WMD/savings were empirically correct.
So you want PF to retroactively check people's predictions to see if they were correct? That would be interesting to see, but it's clearly not what they do, they address current statements based on current information.
Now was there any reason to believe that something in that statement wasn't correct when he made it? (for example was it not going to be scored by the CBO?) Otherwise I don't see the bias.
> Now was there any reason to believe that something in that statement wasn't correct when he made it?
Yes, at the time Orszag made the statement many commentators (including the CNN link a few posts up) contested the CBO's projections and said they were manipulated, with a particular focus on the CLASS Act. Orszag doubled down just like Powell did before the UN, just like the yellowcake incident.
I happen to think this specific case is fairly cut and dried, but short of Orszag admitting to a "lie" it is impossible to know what was in his mind. (Though it should also be said that Politifact does not precisely distinguish between whether a statement is empirically false and whether the speaker is a 'liar with their pants on fire').
Anyway, this is one example that stuck in my head as a numerical one which was so important beforehand, and so checkable both at the time and today, that even partisans on opposite sides might meet up to compare notes afterwards.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/blog/10/03/04/No-Gimmick/
A program which was supposed to save $86 billion is declared insolvent and discontinued before it was put into production, by the people who were intimately involved in designing it. They pushed hard to pass the bill and made statements like Orszag did above.In the interest of being nonpartisan, I think that history will look on these kinds of statements in the same way we now look on Colin Powell's presentation to the UN in the context of the runup to Iraq. At best the WMDs/savings just weren't there, and it was an honest mistake. At worst, they lied. Somewhere in the middle one might call them guilty of wishful thinking and exaggeration. But whatever you call it, it's hard to continue to maintain that those who claimed the presence of WMD/savings were empirically correct.