The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scoring of the tax bill was released at 8:49 PM on Friday night, and this link will take you to it. The title of this one-page document is a mouthful: “Summary of the Deficit Effects of a Bill to Provide for Reconciliation Pursuant to the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2018, As Filed by the Senate on December 1, 2017.” The numbers here are critically important, though there may be some additional financial adjustments, given that the Senate debate ended in the early hours of Saturday morning and given that the Senate-version text has handwritten notes on the legislation that have not been read (let alone scored) by CBO. We note that some commentators believe the notes are not even legible.

Anyway, this is our political system, like it or not. As Churchill observed in the House of Commons in 1947, “Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…” Sir Winston did not originate the line, but he did make it famous. Its origin is subject to debate. I personally verified that factoid with the chief archivist of the Churchill Library.

The Senate version of the tax bill (whatever it is) and the House version (which we have been able to read) will now go to a conference for the next round in this political dogfight. Our view remains that there will be a final tax bill and that Trump will sign it no matter what the final bill looks like.

We will set aside comments on the detailed tax changes, as they have already been discussed and are not final until we get a House-Senate conference version.

Let’s get to the deficit.

We are using the CBO scoring detailed in the link as a guide. Remember that budget and deficit projections have a wide margin of error. They are based on lots of assumptions. About the only thing we really know about those assumptions is that they are wrong on the day you make them. The whole idea is to get the theme right and to try to get close to what the final numbers will be.