So my feature for our latest issue at @theprospect is about the Congressional Budget Office. No I didn't lose a bet! This is an important subject! Let me explain: prospect.org/politics/congr…
@theprospect CBO estimates the cost of legislation and makes economic forecasts for Congress. Those estimates are mostly wrong. That's not necessarily a knock on CBO; what they're being asked to do is nearly impossible. prospect.org/politics/congr… 
@theprospect CBO has misjudged interest rates every year for the last ten. It radically underestimated the cost of the Trump tax cuts, and they couldn't have been passed under the reconciliation method if they got it right. prospect.org/politics/congr…
@theprospect The reason this is important: at the same time CBO is making imprecise estimates in line with the mainstream of the economics professions, Congress is overwhelmingly relying on them as a source of information. prospect.org/politics/congr…
@theprospect In other words, it’s not that CBO governs Washington, it’s that Washington has allowed itself to be governed, by an unelected collection of well-meaning economists given a fundamentally impossible task. prospect.org/politics/congr…
And this will be critical if the next Democratic president tries to do, well, anything, and gets hamstrung by CBO scores and spending rules. It's an obscure but critical part of the system that's given far too much weight: prospect.org/politics/congr…
I also go into the history of CBO a bit, which turned radically on former House Ways and Means Committee chair Wilbur Mills getting caught with a stripper:
