Glenn Greenwald catches Reason consistently referencing CBO reports as authoritative information when it benefits a “libertarian” position and deriding the use of CBO reports when it validates a liberal position.
When it suits them — meaning when the CBO issues negative findings about Obama’s domestic policies — Reason holds up the CBO as an authoritative oracle not to be questioned. Three weeks ago, Reason‘s Nick Gillespie warned of “massive premium hikes” based on “the CBO’s latest assay of the Senate’s health-care reform plan.”
[…]As soon as the CBO began issuing reports that undermined rather than bolstered Reason’s desire to sink all health care reform, the CBO was instantaneously transformed from (a) “a straight-laced bureau whose job is to ground congressional fantasy in budgetary reality” and which “is biased toward the certain and the real and the measurable” into (b) an agency whose “authority is belied by the highly speculative nature of its work,” which is “keeper of the nation’s budgetary myths” and plagued by a “woeful record.”
Either CBO data models built to project budgets for a piece of legislation holds value or it doesn’t. They can’t have it both ways. It seems Reason is plagued by a woeful record of hypocrisy.