Last week President Biden outlined his vision for a substantially expanded federal government financed by tax increases. Congress will need to assess the details of this vision once it is in legislative language, and it should task that congressional estimating agencies to produce a “dynamic score” of the proposed bills, argues AAF’s Director of Fiscal Policy Gordon Gray. In this analysis, Gray reviews the history of dynamic scoring and considers its impact on assessing policy tradeoffs.

An excerpt:

Federal policymaking is replete with overpromising and underdelivering. And this approach could hardly be surprising, given the outsized significance advocates often invest in their respective causes – whether complex tax legislation, health legislation, or other significance federal policy change. The debate shaping up around the administration’s new spending and tax proposals is no different. But as the high-level talking points evolve into legislation, policymakers in Congress should look to revive dynamic scoring in evaluating major legislation.

Read the analysis.