GOP's Tim Scott takes aim at the CBO but makes himself look bad accidentally

[LetMyPeopleVote]

It’s a problem that the senator accused the budget office of being wrong about things that happened before its existence, but that’s not all.

Link to tweet

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/tim-scott-video-congressional-budget-office-mistakes-rcna212937

Indeed, the offensive couldn’t be any more straightforward: The budget office produced objective data that makes the Republican Party’s domestic policy megabill — the inaptly named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — look like a far-right disaster, so the president and GOP officials have scrambled to discredit the source of independent information.

Some of these efforts have been more embarrassing than others. The Washington Post reported:

Like many congressional Republicans and members of the Trump administration already have, Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) on Thursday attacked the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office for its scoring of the GOP’s massive tax and immigration bill, arguing that the CBO’s estimates are inaccurate. In a video shared on X, Scott accused the office ... of being wrong in its scoring of tax cuts implemented in the 1930s and the 1960s.

There was, however, a rather glaring problem with the senator’s pitch: The Congressional Budget Office wasn’t created until 1974. When Scott said, “Wrong then. Wrong Now,” he was, unfortunately, wrong.

And it’d be an unfortunate example of a senator taking aim at the budget office, but stumbling over inconvenient facts, if we were to stop there. But as it turns out, that wasn’t the only problem with his pitch.

Scott claimed, for example, “In 2017, the CBO said the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would increase the deficit and the debt by trillions of dollars. What happened? They were wrong.” Actually, no, the CBO was right: The Republicans’ 2017 package of tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations really did increase the deficit and the debt by trillions of dollars. That’s not a matter of opinion; it’s simply what happened......

For good measure, let’s not skip past the fact that Scott went on to say, “The Laffer Curve is right. ... It has always worked; I think it always will work.”

The Laffer Curve is a creation of Art Laffer, arguably the nation’s preeminent cheerleader for a ridiculous idea: Tax cuts are self-financing. He’s spent decades telling policymakers they can slash tax rates, especially for the wealthy, and the tax breaks necessarily pay for themselves through stronger economic growth and increased revenue.

Republicans have repeatedly tried to govern with this idea in mind, and they’ve always failed. Critics of the Laffer Curve have consistently been proven right, and proponents of the discredited idea have consistently been proven wrong.

Scott really ought to know all of this. He is, after all, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and a member of the Senate Finance Committee. But despite these many glaring, factual errors, the Republican senator not only put this video online, he left it online even after its errors were exposed.

It reflects an indifference toward reality that has become a staple of the GOP’s offensive against the Congressional Budget Office.