That’s why the CBO included the ridiculous “savings” from the 1/2 trillion in Medicare cuts in the Health Scare cramdown. They may be bipartisan, but they follow the instructions of congress, which isn’t bipartisan.

That’s just one of many examples. They also excluded the trillions of dollars in premiums from the “cost” of the bill. Because those are the instructions Congress gave them. If it isn’t money collected by the government, there can be no “cost”. Sweet, isn’t it?

The CBO is just part of the scam.

By law, Congress cannot give any orders to the CBO it can only request, and in very general terms, that the CBO produce a report on a given topic. Congress is then legally bound to use the numbers provided by the CBO.

Oddly, it would actually be a breach of the U.S. constitution if a representative or senator were to make his or her decisions based on any data other than that which is fed to congress by the CBO.

Democrats won in 2006, they were seated in 2007 – the FY 2008 budget, while initially proposed by Bush, was in fact a democrat budget. Remember, Congress controls spending and all spending originates in the House – that was the Democrats. The President can “propose” all he wants, Congress decides on the final numbers and what is and what isn’t covered. To be fair, part of the FY08 budget was failed stimulus #1 – remember our $600 rebate checks that the Obamas made fun of?

Anyway, red besides the clear communist association typically parallels with blood, rage, war.. etc.

Whereas blue – lapis lazuli in old Egypt was symbolic for heaven – generally evokes a sense of youth, spirituality (earthen), truth, peace.

My theory – Democrats probably historically grasped blue because of their stronger emotional tie to domestic programming; Republicans to the red for their intellectual understanding for the need for national defense and a strong international presence. Today’s Newpublicervatives probably are trying to rightfully shed their public ‘red’ to today’s Communist Libnuts.

Battle of the red, white and blue perspectives. White, the color of holy purity and God’s truths – there’s you have your old guard conservatives.

Opportunistic and completely unrelated post to babble color theory, I know, but I had to have a crack at the question Canary.

I think that the convention of using red for Republicans and blue for Democrats began with the 2000 presidential campaign. They used to switch-one year Repubs red and the next election blue-but that changed in 2000. I think that they used to switch because no one wanted the connotation of red for communism, but that is just speculation on my part. Now, no one remembers what the word “pinko” means and a lot of Americans are OK with the word socialism (or so the polls say), so maybe it’s OK for Republicans to always be red. Personally, I like switching. In this case, red would have a connotation of red ink, so I think it would bias one against the party in red.

On a larger note, these graphs don’t make sense. I’m not trying to be a smartass here, but doesn’t the fiscal year end 9/30? How could the 2008 budget be a Democrat budget? Do they mean that it was a Democrat congress? Last I checked, the executive branch was in our control for 2008. Can someone shed some light on this?

The numbers are from the CBO.

And all the CBO does is what Congress tells them to do. They may make some side comments, but the data they produce is as Congress dictates. And Congress never says “produce a report using your decades of experience in order to tell the American people the truth about this topic”. Oh no. Those are NEVER the instructions.

So, for example, for the Health Scare Shill, the CBO was instructed to include the 1/2 Trillion dollar Medicare “savings” in its economic analysis, even though the CBO janitor could tell you that the chances of Medicare being cut are zero. But the “report” assumes the fantasy. And that wasn’t the only fantasy either.

So what does all that mean…..bottom line.

It means that these charts are WILDLY OPTIMISTIC. Things are much worse than the charts show.

(note: on second view, these are from the Republicans CBO, so they might actually be realistic).

The reality is tax shortfalls this year will be damaging enough because of the combination of the real un/underemployment rate and further decline in economic activity as it continues to work against the grain of the CBO’s expected ‘recovery’ from this ‘recession.’