Both are capable of being gamed by their clients:
The bill’s architects have cleverly gamed the rules to minimally satisfy the requirements of getting the referee to say the new promise is funded, while creating real long-term fiscal risk. There is an obvious parallel to the financial engineers who worked with credit rating agencies to tweak new risky credit derivatives until they barely qualified for a AAA rating. The financial engineers did not eliminate real risk, they instead solved for the rating agency’s scoring model. They then sold these products to clients as safe investments, with a wink. The authors of the pending health care bills have done the same with the CBO scorekeepers. You are the potential client being asked to buy this product. The proponents assure you that the scorekeeper says it’s OK. Then they wink.
