What does the $55 million dollar a year budget get you with the Congressional Budget Office

What do you know little about the Congressional Budget Office?
Don’t worry. Most don’t.  And maybe that is by design.

But let me fill you in on a bit about who they are and what they do.

The CBO is a federal agency within the legislative branch of the U.S. government that provides budget and economic information to Congress. You know things like hundreds of reports each year on how to decrease our deficit and balance our budget.

They are supposed to be impartial but many question if this is true.  And these researchers have a budget of $55 million dollars each year to help pay for the memos and reports that highlight options for our nation’s budget.

Now to be clear, their options are not legislative bills that Congress votes on. They are just ideas that can help guide them and from which they may use to craft future legislation.  Their website is www.cbo.gov in case you want to read of the ideas they came up with to reduce the deficit over the next ten years.

To reduce the deficit, they mention such things as taking away from our Social Security in that everyone, no matter how little or how much they had worked and earned and put into the system will receive the same amount of benefits.  This is straight out of a Communist playbook where everyone gets the same piece of the pie.  And, using your critical thinking skills, why do you think they would want to present this as an option?

Oh, but their ideas do not stop there.  Let’s look at a couple of the options they have for our veterans such as reducing VA disability compensation by $30 once the veterans reaches social security retirement age.  Or what about their option to end disability compensation for veterans with a 10% and 20% disability rating or even their option to tax veteran disability benefits.  And they don’t stop at veterans for they also suggest reducing our military budget yet once again. We have all heard how our military is facing its worst recruiting in more than 50 years thereby eroding our military advantage.  Yet in 2022, defense spending decreased by 5.3 percent which is 16.7 percent lower than in 2010 thereby setting up a dangerous scenario for our nations security.  And now an option mentioned in the CBO says the federal government could reduce our country’s deficit over the next ten years by once again reducing the Department of Defense budget.  More specifically and this is a quote “This option consists of three alternatives that would reduce DoD’s funding by $1.1 trillion over 10 years ($1.0 trillion in 2023 dollars). In all three, the reduction would be achieved by decreasing the number of full-time active component forces by between 18 percent and 21 percent relative to the 2023 force.”

I find all these options completely unacceptable and not worth the time to have put on paper.  My thought is if the CBO is going to come up with options like they did for our military, Social Security, and for our veterans then maybe the best way we can help reduce the debt our country has is to get rid of the CBO’s annual $55 million dollar budget and streamline it for more representative options.