Liberal group to GOP: No dynamic scoring

A liberal group urged congressional Republicans on Monday not to rely on so-called “dynamic” scoring for tax reform proposals and other major pieces of fiscal legislation.

{mosads}The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said that those projections are unreliable and can easily be manipulated, while defending the more traditional “static” scores.

Dynamic scoring, the group wrote, “would damage the credibility of the budget process.”

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has said that the next Congress will use the more dynamic projections, calling it “accurate scoring, or reality-based scoring” last week.

Dynamic scoring projects how broad changes on taxes and other fiscal matters changes the size of the economy. House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) got a dynamic score for his tax reform draft this year, which found that the plan would spur anywhere from $50 billion to $700 billion in economic growth.

But CBPP noted Monday that current projections do try to account for how people change their behavior in response to tax and fiscal changes. The group also pointed to the dynamic projections to Camp’s proposal, insisting that illustrated the uncertainty in those kinds of scores and could allow lawmakers to cherry-pick their favorite score.

And CBPP tried to distinguish between the more dynamic score that the Senate’s immigration reform bill got in 2013 with the sort of projections that Ryan and other Republicans are calling for, maintaining that the immigration bill would automatically have an effect on the economy because it would lead to increases in the work force and population at-large.