Biden-Sanders on budgeting

The Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force released its recommendations in July. The NY Times listed six takeaways in the areas of health care, criminal justice, climate change, the economy, education, and immigration. On a separate topic, here I quote what the report writes about the federal budgeting process, which Stephanie Kelton referenced in her August 11 interview with Dissent Magazine.

"We are committed to a budget process which eliminates biases against certain types of productive investment and provides a broad and inclusive analytical framework when assessing the economic impact of legislation. To help achieve this goal, we recommend the establishment of a commission to study shortcomings in the budget process and provide detailed recommendations. This includes examining scoring practices used by official scorekeepers, such as accounting for uncertainty in official estimates and incorporating assumptions about the extent to which public investment crowds out other economic activity.

"The budget process should also be examined to determine whether better evaluating the economic and fiscal impacts of tax expenditures can lead to more efficient, equitable, and productive tax policies. Official scorekeepers should be fully transparent in their methods, including making their forecasting models public (as does the Federal Reserve) and strive to increase the gender, racial, and academic diversity on both their staff and their Panel of Economic Advisors."

I was of course very pleased to see the mention of uncertainty and assumptions of crowding out, which today are handled unrealistically in ways that bias the legislative process against allocating resources toward things such as education, healthcare, pensions and research.

I should note that, to its credit, the Congressional Budget Office has become more transparent in recent years, for example posting a description of and code for their health insurance microsimulation model, HISIM2, in 2019.