Ryan’s Response to Center’s Analysis of “Roadmap” Is Off Base — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

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by Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

We are quite disappointed that, in responding to our analysis of his budget plan, Rep. Paul Ryan accuses the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities of “partisan demagoguery” as well as “factual errors and misleading statements.” Quite the contrary, we applied the same rigorous analytical process to Rep. Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future that we do to every issue we study. We worked for more than a month on our analysis, and we believe that, if anything, we bent over backwards to make sure we were fair to the Congressman and his plan. Frankly, based on the attack on our analysis that Rep. Ryan issued yesterday, we took his plan far more seriously than he took our analysis of it.

Rep. Ryan accuses us of partisanship, but we relied on the best nonpartisan sources available. The Tax Policy Center, on whose revenue estimates we relied heavily, is a highly respected, nonpartisan institution whose codirector, Rosanne Altshuler, was senior economist for President George W. Bush’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform in 2005. Our other key sources of information included the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration. Rep. Ryan says that we made errors and misleading statements, but it is he — not we — who has done so. He ignores what we wrote and accuses us of writing things that we did not. In fact, he even selectively deletes words from a sentence that he quotes from one of our earlier reports to change the clear meaning of what we wrote. He also inaccurately represents some important aspects of CBO’s analysis of his plan.

As outlined below, we examined every one of Rep. Ryan’s complaints about our work, and not a single one withstands scrutiny.
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