I don’t know why this Reason.com article was even necessary: I don’t pretend to be a hardcore fiscal pundit, but you don’t need to be one in order to understand the CBO scoring process. Congress tells them what to assume when they score a bill. The CBO then puts together an analysis based on those assumptions. If the assumptions are not, to turn a phrase, reality-based – as they were rather notoriously not in, say, the 110th and 111th Congress – then the analysis is going to be flawed. Or, as the first commenter here alluded: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
The answer thus is to make sure that Congress is being run by people who are not making bad assumptions in order to justify spending money that we don’t actually have. We’re making a decent start on that, but there’s a way to go yet.