Budget Zombie

The internet’s quick news summaries often have short teaser stories.  A few days ago ABC24 ran a brief story captioned “Gov’t claims ‘zombie’ program is reducing deficit”.  With Halloween just a few days away and the endless wrangling inside the Beltway, I was curious to read the article with the reference to "lurching along indefinitely".

The initial "zombie" story refereed to a budget gimmick and phantom savings linked to publications by the Concord Coalition and the citation of the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program (CLASS).  With the hook set, it led to even more surfing of the internet to refine these two leads.  

My first stop in the zombie-surf led me to the Concord Coalition.  Their website has explanations of “dynamic scoring” of the budget proposals and other related topics.  There is one particularly intriguing reference to legislation entitled “The Honest Budget Act”, which is sponsored by Senators Olympia Snowe and Jeff Sessions.  It does make one wonder if the existing budget process has a more catchy nick-name inside the Beltway. 

Finally, I hit pay-dirt in my second effort to find the description of a "zombie-program".  The word-picture arising from “lurching along indefinitely” is colorful and is used to describe Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program (CLASS).  

The most recent zombie story deals with the alleged gaming of the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) scoring rules. According to Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in the AP story on October 14th, he described pulling the plug on CLASS with it’s $80-billion of faux-budget reduction.  Eliminating a lame program still has consequences because it forces other programs to take up the slack mandated by the current deficit reduction program of the 12-member super-committee.  Examining the budgetary gimmick led me to a series of articles written by Peter Suderman at the reason.com/blog.  

Mr. Suderman has been reporting (blogging) on the budget-zombie in a series of articles in Reason.com.

• On May 27, 2011, Suderman blogged about the CBO having scored the premium payments from CLASS as a $70-billion in deficit reduction.  Apparently, the rules for scoring a piece of legislation allows the analysts to ignore the future payout of “benefits” contemplated by the bill.
  
• On September 14, 2011, Suderman blogged about gaming the CBO’s scoring rules. The failure discuss the absence of financial feasibility seems troublesome, when analysts in other agencies had concluded it would take 230-million people paying into the program to make CLASS financial feasible.  The troublesome part is the U.S. workforce is a number smaller than 230-million.  Once again, the devil is in the details.  Mark Twain could probably have a field day with this set of facts and figures. 

• On October 10, 2011, Suderman blogged about the CLASS zombie and referred to other federal programs (Medicare and other “trust funds”) that are counted twice in the budget process.  The Washington Post also referred to the double-counting.

My checkbook only has three elements “in”, “out”, and “current balance”.  It would be helpful for the politicians to quit wandering in the tall grass and adopt a similar guideline for balancing the books.