The Congressional Budget Office appears in these episodes chiefly as the source of the fiscal projections that frame the show’s arguments about deficits, entitlements and regulation. Guests cite it as a nonpartisan scorer of legislation and as the agency whose long-run numbers define the boundaries of the possible. The excerpts do not describe the office’s founding, structure or statutory mandate; they show it only through the uses to which guests put its estimates.
The entitlement projection
In the earliest excerpt, Peter Suderman invokes the Congressional Budget Office to describe the choice he says the country faces. If you look at what the Congressional Budget Office has said, he tells Bob Zadek, the options are to get rid of most of the government outside of Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid — the big entitlements — or to fix those programs, or to raise taxes dramatically more than they have ever been historically. He puts the historical tax level at about 19% of GDP, and says raising it to 30 or 35% of total economic output is what it would take to keep spending at the projected rate. In his framing, tinkering is not going to do it Is the US the Next Enron? (2011).
The same projection recurs in a later episode, where a caller identified as Evan from Alabama says he is looking at a chart based on CBO data showing that by 2025 the entire federal budget will be consumed by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on the debt, with no money left over for other basic functions. He asks whether that is the breaking point and what will happen when it is reached. Ivan Eland answers that it is hard to say, suggesting that one trigger might be the loss of the dollar’s reserve-currency status, which he says facilitates a lot of the borrowing The Return of Big Spending Republicans? (2017).
The agency as nonpartisan scorer
Eland returns to the office later in the same episode, in the context of what to expect from the incoming Trump administration on deficit spending. He notes that the projections the caller mentioned come from the Congressional Budget Office, which he describes as a nonpartisan government agency in the Congress that does bill costing, and whose estimates he says are usually better than the administration’s, whatever administration is in power. He predicts that tax cuts combined with increased infrastructure and defense spending, and no entitlement reform, may widen the deficit The Return of Big Spending Republicans? (2017).
Ed Conard cites the office’s long-range projection in a different connection — the argument for high-skilled immigration. He states that the Congressional Budget Office projects government spending to grow 10% of GDP over the next 30 years as baby boomers retire, reaching 45%, and that enormous growth is needed to keep government spending down as they retire. He places current government spending, counting state, federal and local, at 35 to 36% of GDP, which he calls historically high for that point in the economic cycle Debunking Inequality Myths with Ed Conard (2017).
Regulatory scoring and the proposed regulatory budget
Sam Batkins raises the office in the context of cost-benefit analysis. Asked by Bob Zadek whether laws undergo the same cost-benefit analysis as regulations, Batkins answers that there is to some extent cost-benefit analysis on a fiscal realm: when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act or Dodd-Frank, it got a sense from a fiscal component of how much money was going out, how much was coming in, and what it would do to revenues. But he says there was very little discussion of what this would mean for regulation. He states that the Congressional Budget Office, which does this analysis, said it would impose significant regulation, but that they just didn’t have the apparatus. He then describes a new move to perhaps create a division within the Congressional Budget Office — a regulatory budget office — that would scrutinize legislation for regulatory implications and also look at pending or recent regulations to determine their overall macroeconomic effect on the economy A Lame Duck’s Last Stand (2017).
In the same episode, Batkins explains the Congressional Review Act as the mechanism by which Congress can undo regulations by simple majority, noting that it passed almost unanimously in 1996 and that certain resolutions of disapproval are privileged under its text, so it does not require 60 votes in the Senate. He compares it to budget reconciliation, which he says also needs only 51 votes. He calls the Congressional Review Act probably the most effective way to undo a rule because it is a law rather than a slow regulatory process A Lame Duck’s Last Stand (2017).
Deficits, debt and the limits of projection
Chris Edwards supplies the most detailed figures attributed to current projections in these excerpts. He says the federal government will spend $5.1 trillion this year and take in $3.3 trillion in taxes, a deficit of around $1.8 trillion, which he translates into an individual worker earning $33,000 a year while spending $51,000 and borrowing $18,000 fresh every year. He adds that even when things return to normal a year or two from now, the government will be taxing about 75% of what it spends, and that accumulated federal debt is equal to about 100% of GDP — the highest in over 200 years, matching the previous high around World War II. Unlike the debt spikes after the Civil War and the two World Wars, he says, today’s debt is spiking even though the country is not at war, and the projections show it on a skyrocketing upward path. Economists cannot say when, he concludes, but a financial crisis or a massive and disastrous tax hike will come Is it too late to step back from the edge of fiscal insanity? (2020).
Bob Zadek’s framing in that episode supplies the question the office’s numbers are made to answer: whether some entity or group of people in the world will eventually say no more and cut the United States off, and what that would realistically look like. He notes that this has never been experienced or even read about Is it too late to step back from the edge of fiscal insanity? (2020).
Across episodes
The office is invoked across five episodes spanning 2011 to 2020, and the treatment is consistent rather than developing: in each case a guest cites CBO projections or scoring to establish the scale of the fiscal problem or the regulatory burden, and no guest in these excerpts disputes the office’s numbers or its nonpartisanship. What changes is the use — Suderman and Eland deploy the entitlement projection against spending policy, Conard deploys the long-run spending projection in service of an immigration argument, Batkins discusses a proposed regulatory division within the office, and Edwards supplies current-year deficit and debt figures. The excerpts show no argument between episodes over what the Congressional Budget Office is or whether it should be believed.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the Congressional Budget Office was created, by what statute, or under what authority it operates; they do not name its directors or describe its internal structure beyond Batkins’s mention of a proposed regulatory division. They do not give the office’s own words, only guests’ characterizations of its projections and scoring. Nor do they record any criticism of the office’s methodology or any dispute over a specific CBO estimate. The ending of the 2011 episode’s final segment and the 2017 segments that break off mid-heading are not available here, so any further discussion of the office in those portions is not reflected.