Start with Joan McCarter's excellent thread (if you have not already done so) where she breaks down the raw hypocrisy of diminishing the CBO's estimates as merely "their opinion"
"There are no fact, only interpretations" - Nietzsche
Now that is someone I want to borrow money from. A lot of money.
Of course, with that sort of crappy attitude you couldn't craft a pot to piss in or a window to toss it out of. So Friedrich's legacy is pretty slim when it comes to piss-pots and windows. He did manage to die alone in a state of syphilitic insanity.
"To measure is to know" - Lord Kelvin
Lord Kelvin, on the other hand, could knock out six piss-pots before breakfast, with each of such measured precision that it would make you swoon with admiration. And, unlike Nietzsche, His Lordship had the good sense and manners to live a very long and productive life and then peacefully die at home in his own bed, completely sane and universally loved and admired.
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." - John Adams
Yes, they are stubborn things, and thank the Good Lord for that small grace. But they are also ours. And I mean everyone's. Yours, mine, all of us. Facts don't build walls, they tear them down. Facts don't separate people, they unite them.
And, my word, do the Plutocrats ever hate that state of affairs. Facts are just, well, too damn egalitarian for some people's liking.
The Sun is not 92,955,807.27 miles from Earth just for the wealthy. Iron does not melt at 2797 Deg-F only when a rich man heats it. If King Croesus and a beggar both jumped off a bridge then both would accelerate at 32.2 Ft/s^2 from gravity's pull. You fall as quickly with your pockets full as empty, and that must be some form of Godless Socialism.
And these facts, the very nature of them, their universal acceptance and availability to all, matter. And they matter a lot. And perhaps what matters most are not the individual facts, but that such a thing as "facts" exist at all. For most of human history, especially the long bits of our time here when life was precisely "nasty, brutish, and short", facts did not exist. What existed was only what the powerful told the weak. That something could be true, in and of itself, and not by virtue of a mailed fist demanding it be so, must have been a radical new idea. Facts are really an amazingly progressive concept.
For one thing they allow us to have a civilized, productive discourse without arming ourselves with cleavers and hacking each other to bits. Because even if we did that, the Sun would still be 92,955,807.27 miles from earth. And all the wealth and weapons and crowned heads threatening us with horrible retribution can't make the celestial pair one inch closer or farther apart.
Can there still be arguments? Sure. We can argue about the methodology used to measure the distance from the Earth to the Sun and whether or not that precludes an error of .000000001%. We can bicker about the Earth's wobbly orbit and the fact that this little shimmy we do on our annual spin throws the numbers off a few inches. Not exactly a hill most would choose to die on.
So sure, you can argue about how far the Sun is from the Earth, but at least you will not have to do so with some idiot on Fox & Friends who is claiming the Sun is the size of an orange and that it is only nine feet way. Well, not yet.
"The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a federal agency within the legislative branch of the United States government. It is a government agency that provides economic data to Congress. The CBO was created as a nonpartisan agency by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974."
But all of a sudden we have the CBO being reduced, trivialized...invalidated...by referring to their data as nothing better than "opinions"
So, who is then the umpire? Who is to be the arbiter of all things budget and deficit if not the non-partisan CBO?
Does President Obama get to come up with his own set of deficit numbers and use those? No? Then whose numbers do we use...Speaker Boehner's or ex-Speaker Pelosi's? Mitch McConnells's or Harry Reid's?
Yours? Mine? Glen Beck's? Keith Olberman's?
Without an agreed upon source of data, everything is well and truly down the rabbit hole
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone. "It means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."
So how do we even start to get out of this deficit mess if every interested party gets to bring their own set of numbers to the table?
Who gets to decide what a new environmental law will really cost the taxpayers...Exxon or the Sierra Club?
How do we reach common ground once the Sun is argued to be the size of an orange and only nine feet away, and that demented position is not scornfully dismissed as brain rotting gibberish, but actually sanctified as just "another opposing view"?
Who gets to count how many legs the dog has...or even decide what a leg is?
"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?
Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." - Abraham Lincoln
So here is where the rabbit hole Joan McCarter showed us leads:
The Plutocrats do not care about the facts. They only care that we disagree among ourselves as to what those facts are. Because once that happens there are no facts...just the coin purse and the mailed fist.
* Plutocrats don't give a two-shits about whose numbers are right and whose are wrong. They don't care about the base-runner being safe or out. They just want sand thrown in the umpire's eyes to make sure everyone is too busy arguing to notice they just sold the ballpark we are all in to China.
* If we do not use the CBO numbers, what numbers do we use? And we do all have to use the same numbers. If your yardstick is a different length than mine, in fact if all yardsticks are different from each other...how is anything to be measured?
* Plutocrats eat this up with a spoon. Create mayhem and then order is sold by the man with the deepest pockets as the solution. "Why, look at this, another analysis by a "think tank" that supports everything I personally want....Alert Fox News"
* It would be laughable, if not so sad, that the ones here who fancy themselves as "patriots" are the biggest fools in this game.
So the real danger is not whether a rust-colored moon-calf like Speaker Boehner agrees or disagrees with the CBO numbers.
All that matters for the plutocrats is that the umpire now has sand in his eyes.
So who do we get to throw the sand?
His name is Dick Armey
Freedomworks has been the engine for the plan to discredit the CBO
Of course, Freedomworks is just the puppet the Koch Bros and world class plutocrats like the Scaife family dangle on strings to incite the Fox crowd (as usual) to become the sheep with frikkin' laser beams on their heads of the plutonomy.
This ain't just about the CBO. It is about the science of global warming becoming "climate change", and then weather being passed off as climate ("gee, it was cold today, I guess those liberal eggheads were wrong again"). It is about the baffling continued existence of supply-side voodoo economics after thirty years of documented failure. It is the watered down version of Bob Dole's health-care plan that passed last year being called a triumph of Marxist ideology.
It is about the USA being 27th on any number of lists of who in the world is smart, healthy, and prepared to face the future and having that shouted down by "American Exceptionalism"
It is why China will have 12,000 (that's right, count 'em) miles of high-speed rail in service by 2012 and we are told, with a commendably straight face: "high-speed rail doesn't work"
It is why cavemen rode dinosaurs and God buried fossils in the 6,000 year old earth to "test our faith"
And it is not really new. The plutocrats didn't want the goddamn bible in standardized plain English either. They were no friend of Gutenberg. Universal Public Education was anything but universally loved by the swells of yesteryear. Christ, in the Golden Era of the 19th Century that the Right is fanatically bent on leading us back to, the high-school graduation rate was less than 10%. And that was for white men.
But then, why allow women and minorities and the lower classes in general access to something as dangerous as "facts"? The next thing you know they are getting all uppity. And letting just any sort of person get all uppity was not what the 19th Century was about.
Can you imagine how infuriating it would be to have some miserable peasant stand up and say: "Hey, knucklehead, the Sun is not the size of an orange and nine feet away, Here are the facts..."
Where is the joy of beating some dirty street urchin with your ivory handled mahogany walking stick if the little bag of rags knows more about the material strength of mahogany than you do?
"Poor Reggie, did you hear? Well, he was black-balled from the club after that incident. Really, we had no choice after the beastly urchin factually bested him"
But fear not, Reggie Old Bean, this is the New American Stupid. If it is inconvenient, just invalidate it. It doesn't matter if you throw the baby out with the bathwater, there are plenty more where that wet little bastard came from. Break open some incubators, fill some wash tubs, and open some more damn windows. God is on our side and the forecast is for torrential downpours of babies and bathwater and discarded facts from coast-to-coast. It is the Golden age of Plutocracy. You will learn to accept the New Facts that The Brahmins have bought and paid for from their think tanks, fed through their echo chamber, and then broadcast with the volume pre-set to "11". Humpty Dumpty is today's guest on Fox News and will explain it all.
In time you may even come to love and appreciate these New Facts, and welcome them as you would a second bowl of gruel.
Of course, if anyone still has the urge to go look at the validity of CBO forecasting, I will be the last person to stop you.
CBO's Economic Forecasting Record
CBO's Economic Forecasting Record - 2009 Update
So again, if we don't use the CBO's numbers as a starting point for all of us...whose numbers do we use for Congressional debate and policy decisions?
If the answer to that question is more than one source then the plutocrats have indeed turned the Sun into something the size of an orange and it really is only nine feet away.
PS - If anyone thinks the attack on the CBO "just happened"...well...more fool they. Cheers
PPS - No, I do not really think that the CBO numbers are "facts". They are projections of economic models that are predictive in nature and very much dependent on the quality of the data used for the starting assumptions. The point is that there must be a universally accepted non-partisan model used by everybody or the whole exercise is simply expensive mayhem and gibberish, which are pretty good descriptions of GOP politics anyways. But sod all that...that would lead us down a different rabbit hole and so it would be a different thread where we could all joyfully wrap ourselves around the axle of semantics and scientific theory. Some other time, mates.