Sam Stein recalls some Bush era CBO projections.
When the CBO predicted in 2004 that Bush's new tax and spending proposals would produce deficits of $2.75 trillion over ten years, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget declared that ''even CBO would admit we don't honestly know what these numbers will look like 10 years from now.'' [...]
In a similar vein, conservatives were beside themselves when the CBO refused to run the 2004 Bush tax cuts through various economic models to see if the government could, in the end, make money by stimulating spending. Rather, the CBO used a "static" method and found $1.2 trillion worth of deficits through the next decade. Republicans, naturally, largely ignored the findings. [...]
In October 2003, the CBO was asked to do a study about the costs of the Iraq War. According to varying scenarios of troop deployment the total price tag ranged from $85 billion to $200 billion over a ten-year period. A year later, the projected costs had risen further. Having already spent $123 billion, the CBO was now estimating that the prosecution of both Iraq and Afghanistan would total roughly $1.1 trillion over the subsequent ten years.
Where were the blue dogs and Republican "deficit hawks" back then? Naturally, they were shitting all over the CBO and cheerleading Bush every step of the way.