Pro-Growth Budgeting Act of 2012

Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACK. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Pro-Growth Budgeting Act of 2012.

This would require the CBO to provide lawmakers with macroeconomic impact analysis for major legislation defined by budgetary impact greater than 0.25 percent of annual GDP. Pretty simple.

Current law already requires CBO to provide Congress with the fiscal impact. This bill would require the CBO to give us the economic impact. Now, included in the analysis would be a statement of critical assumptions and also sources of data underlying its estimate, which would provide for maximum transparency.

So if there were questions, we would have the information in front of us so that we could ask additional questions and be sure that we had all of the information in order to make an informed decision.

This is just another tool in our toolkit, and this will help Congress create policy that affects our economy while creating a pro-job agenda, which is on all of our minds and should be our priority. The more information available to policymakers, the better decisions.

There is no panacea in the budget process, but this is one more step in reforming what is a broken process; and we're going to see more information and more bills in the next several weeks talking about this broken process. But this is one more piece to give us one more piece of information.

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