Congressional Budget Office « The Feehery Theory

Posts Tagged ‘Congressional Budget Office’

The Health Care Law Sucks

June 2nd, 2010 by John Feehery

Obama Signing the Health Care Bill / Photo Credit: Keith Ellison

As the Obama Administration grapples with a host of crises, from the Gulf Oil spill, to the potential war on the Korean Peninsula between North and South, to another potential war in the Middle East between Turkey and Israel, to the credit crisis in Europe, to the crisis on our Southern border, it will also have to deal with a crisis of its own making.

The health care law, the one the President signed into law, sucks. There is no other way to describe it. It sucks for those who are trying to find a job, it sucks for those who will have to pay more in premiums, it sucks for our deficit problems, it sucks for American competitiveness, it is sucks for doctors, for patients, for, well, everybody, except maybe those who want the whole system to collapse so that we can impose government run health care in its place.

That is the conclusion of a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and the conclusion of the current occupant of that office, although, of course, they would never put it those terms. Read more...

Tags: Barack Obama, Congressional Budget Office, Gore divorce, Government, Gulf Oil spill, health care, health care law, Korean Civil War, Obama Administration, Turkey-Israeli split
Posted in Bad Decisions, Government, health care | 2 Comments »

The Constant Gardener

May 26th, 2010 by John Feehery

Photo credit: Henry Brisse

In 2005, Paramount released a movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz called The Constant Gardener.

This post has absolutely nothing to do with that movie.

I was thinking about gardening when I was sweeping up the berries from my neighbor’s obnoxious tree, which spews smelly, ugly, messy berries every spring.

Like gardening, it requires constant work to keep my back patio clean.

To be a successful gardener (and believe me, I am not a successful gardener), you have to be constantly working to keep the flowers properly watered and pruned. You also have to constantly work to fight off the weeds. If you don’t, the weeds will eventually take over the garden, and the garden will be lost.

This isn’t a column about gardening. It is a column about government growth.

Like a garden, the government requires constant pruning. The weeds of government (or wasteful, Washington spending) can take over the whole government if there isn’t a constant gardener who is working to prune and cut and pull out the bad spending.

But there isn’t a constant gardener in the federal government, whose sole job is to get rid of wasteful spending. Read more...

Tags: Congress, Congressional Budget Office, Economy, General Accountability Office, K Street, Lobbyist, Office of Management and Budget, Politics, spending
Posted in Government, Politics, Theory, spending | No Comments »

The Budget

May 14th, 2010 by John Feehery

In 1921, the Congress first started thinking about doing a budget. It passed the Budget and Accounting Act legislation that first directed the President to submit a budget. It also created the General Accounting Office (which a couple of years ago changed its name to the General Accountability Office), an agency tasked with making certain that federal dollars were spent wisely.

When in the 1970’s, Richard Nixon decided he had the power to impound funds that he didn’t want to spend (his version of the line-item veto), Congress reacted by passing the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, legislation that created the Congressional Budget Office and created the modern budget process, if you can call it a process.

Under this law that passed more than three decades ago, the Congress is supposed to pass a budget resolution, to outline how it is going to spend money and raise revenue for the next half decade or so. The budget resolution is not a law because it is not signed by the President, but the purpose of it is law-like. The budget is not just a set of suggestions. Sure it can be waived in emergencies, but they have to be big ones (like war, pestilence or natural disasters, that kind of thing). Read more...

Tags: Budget, Congress, Congressional Budget Office, Economy, election, Greece, spending
Posted in Financial Crisis, Politics, Theory, election, spending | 1 Comment »

The Glove Fits

March 31st, 2010 by John Feehery

So, according to various news reports, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman is going to “investigate” corporate America for reacting to the President’s new health care law by promising to take huge tax write-downs because of the expected negative impact of the law on their bottom lines.

This kind of reminds me of when O.J. Simpson decided to launch an “investigation” into who killed his wife.

Who killed the jobs, Mr. Waxman?

You did. And no matter how you try to shift the blame, you can’t escape that truth.

According to the Daily Caller, “Rep. Henry Waxman demanded that AT&T, Verizon, Caterpillar, and Deere & Co. justify their claims about the “costs the companies plan to book related to the new health-care law.” According to Business Week, “Dallas-based AT&T said in a regulatory filing yesterday it would record $1 billion of costs, the most of any U.S. company so far. AT&T previously received a tax-free benefit from the government to subsidize health-care costs for retirees. Under the new bill, AT&T will no longer be able to deduct that subsidy.”

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee put out a couple of fun facts about the terrible impact of this legislation on job creation. Read more...

Tags: Congressional Budget Office, health care, Henry Waxman, Jobs, National Federation of Independent Business, O.J. Simpson, Unemployment
Posted in Government, Politics, Theory, Unemployment, health care | No Comments »

John Feehery is President of the Feehery Group, a strategic advocacy firm dedicated to helping its clients achieve their legislative and communications objectives in Washington D.C.