Squaring the Culture

I just finished reading a brief article at Huffington Post claiming in its headline, “Controversial CBO Report on Stimulus Turns Out Not To Exist.” This refers, of course, to the CBO report Republicans in Congress have been chattering about for the last week, indicating that only about 1/7 of the stimulus package would be spent during the period when stimulus is expected to be needed, and most would be spent afterward.

Here’s the top of Huffington’s article:

Reports of a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, showing that the vast majority of the money in the stimulus package won’t be spent until after 2010, have Democrats on the defensive and the GOP calling for a pullback in wasteful spending.

Funny thing is, there is no such report.

“We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study,” a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.

As you continue to read the article, you discover that the CBO did, in fact, run a computer analysis of a $300 billion portion of the stimulus plan, the version sent to the Appropriations Committee, and apparently then reported the results of the analysis to several Congressmen. No official report was published, hence the headline saying “It does not exist.” The results are real, though, and while they apply only to a portion of the plan, no reason is given to imagine that other portions of the plan would fare better.

The objective way to report this would be to say basically what I said in the last paragraph. As a careful blogger, that’s more or less how I would have reported it: the report is unofficial, and covers only about a third of the plan, but indicates that there could be lags in spending significant enough to prevent the plan from stimulating the economy when it needs to be stimulated. That’s more or less how the Washington Post reported it last Wednesday, along with the same discussion of the limitations of the analysis — that it only covered a portion of the plan — and announcement of how reporters came to obtain the report. It was the Washington Post that called this “a report.”

That’s not how Huffington Post reported it, though, and it was clear from the comments that the Democrats reading HuffPo thought they’d caught the Republicans lying. I linked to the story from a Crooks and Liars post that claimed it was a “phony CBO report” and that the report “did not exist.”

If either of these leftist bloggers had bothered to read the Washington Post’s article about the CBO report from last Wednesday, they would have learned all the details that the HuffPo’s “expose’” reported so breathlessly.

So the basic facts are, the CBO ran a computer analysis, the Republicans announced the results of the analysis, honestly representing it as an analysis of a portion of the stimulus and as an unofficial report, and for the next several years Democrats will be telling each other that the Republicans “invented” a CBO report that “never existed,” those dirty Republicans.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Democrats Control Their Dupes.

It does not take a rocket scientist to understand that only a small fraction of the cost of a 10-year highway project will affect the economy during the first year or two of the project. Apparently, though, it does take a Republican to understand it. The Democrats seem incapable.