You just knew something wasn't quite right with yesterday's report.

True to my pledge, I'm not going to talk about the deficit. But the CBO may have misstated the cost of the Finance Committee's markup bill to the tune of a trillion dollars.

Makes the report after that seem particularly useless.

As Donald Marron observes, that number omits as much as $75 billion in new federal spending. It also omits a $33 billion unfunded mandate on state governments. But the worst part is that the Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary cost estimate omits the cost of the private sector mandates in the Baucus bill.  In Massachusetts, those costs accounted for 60 percent of the total cost of reform.  That suggests the actual cost of the Baucus bill – $829 billion plus $75 billion plus $33 billion, times 2.5 – is well over $2 trillion.

Why did they do this?

Giving the CBO the benefit of the doubt, let's see if we get a new report once the Baucus Bill gets retuned with the legislative language.

Russ