trusted national institutions could be a real beacon in the region. that's what i'm counting on. but in terms of current geopolitical issues certainly another flare-up in gaza, another israeli attack on gaza is going to put the government -- any government that exists -- under tremendous pressure to do more than has been done previously. and i don't think that means doing anything to camp david. i don't think that the camp david treaty is in any, is under any threat in the short or medium term. i think there might be a request for some alterations to enable, um, some more leeway on the gaza border on what can go in and what can go out because that's a highly unpopular stance. ..

that is great. that is healthier than it has been a long time because both sides the way camp david is practiced both sides have been unhealthy. , the mubarak has none predicted that he could do whatever he wanted and still be a moderate as long as he kept the campaign. the israelis can do whatever they wanted and not have to worry about public opinion in their largest and most powerful

regional ally. that is not actually peace. i am looking forward to it. there will not be serious bumps in the road. i am looking forward to a more mature is really egyptian relationship and this is the start of a. i want is really to be worried about egyptian public opinion. why not? >> very important point. it has been dysfunctional on both sides. claiming that democracy in the region was a bad thing but -- they get away with things and the egyptian is clamoring for palestinian rights rhetorically but being perfectly happy to deal with whatever is really policy or u.s. policy. it is interesting and positive.

i agree completely. -- in terms of egypt, i don't think change has been overnight. quite pragmatic and people who are dealing with it dealt with under hosni mubarak. policies will not stay the same. the longer-term game, they certainly see the wind of history blowing. maybe different things. >> can you raise the mike? >> population reference. a look at washington d.c.. the roll to nietzsche played, my question and a lot has been said about the role of young people.

if egypt has population with aging structure of japan, how would you see this whole revolution? >> much older demographic? in proportion to the total, and -- >> and -- that is that >> what is the number you heard? >> any number. >> 30% of the population with 15, and 29. >> and another of the wave before them the lost generation, 28 to 32 with nothing going on

and no hope and no prospect and that was a huge factor and the failure of the hosni mubarak's government to provide economic opportunity, to these multiple generations and possibly the failure to provide them with skills to go out and earn money for themselves without the sort of socialist guaranteed public sector jobs and infrastructure going away. it was a huge. it was a huge. part of its you can't blame the government for because it is a huge problem and i would hate to be the one in charge of solving it but a lot of money disappeared. a lot of jobs were handed out unfairly. there really -- i do blame the government for failing to provide hope for these multiple generations and that was one of

the major factors. >> the youth were not the only ones. >> they were not the only ones and one of the greatest things that i saw again and again during the revolution was multiple generations of families, there was once a quote, the brief vice president, long time shadowy intelligence chief who served as vice president for four two russell senate office building hosni mubarak fall and he gave an obnoxious interview where he said he mispronounced the muslim brotherhood four times. the brother muslim brotherhood. and he said what do we say to the protesters? i tell them to go home. i tell their parents to come and get them and take them home. i did a radio interview that night with american radio station where they mention that

quote. that is hilarious because i just came back and was talking to somebody who is there with their parents and grandmother. that is not going to fly. he is dealing with something more than irresponsible reckless youth. if he thinks that is happening that is why they are losing this game. >> interesting to see how the demographics of the protest movement >> going forward. i have a question in the back. >> thanks. you started the conversation with the main reasons for the revolution was economic and we have not touched on current economic problems that egypt has as well as the insecurity, banks of being robbed the. i was wondering if you could address those issues. thank you. >> i think i did mention those of the biggest challenges the new government has to do. economic situation which is made

a paradox, one of the many paradoxes of the revolution was it was fueled in part by economic distress and economic deprivation both of which have been made worse because of the revolution and the circumstances that exist today. that is a huge factor and the insecurity which is both natural when you are in a state of uncertainty but also those who feel they were scapegoats in what happened. see if you can deal with this situation without us and both of those are extremely dangerous and one of the things i certainly haven't been in egypt as much as ashraf khalil but i felt a lot tense frustration. i saw more street fights that i had ever seen and i was there for five days and i saw something extremely brutal and dangerous with people taking baseball bats. very anecdotal but my impression was people who don't see the future. their economy is not doing well.

go to the airport and i was there months before the revolution year-ago as the forest and went back at the same time this year and in the hotel's, for the economy that deals with stability for tourism and foreign investment it is going to be extremely harmful. one of the factors that i don't know how they will deal with and it could go very badly very quickly is -- if the economy does recover, who knows what happens next? you live there every day. >> exactly. the economy wasn't going all that great before the revolution. was one of those situations where egypt was one of the imf world bank darlings. the situation on ground had more and more economic desperation

and resentments from seeing the top 7% living so well in front of you while everything else was so hard. from that humble beginnings things have gotten much worse. the tourism is the major thing. tourism is not the seaside community of guys -- tourism is one of those things that extends to every aspect of the economy and that is dried up or operating at low capacity and every time there is one of these flareups the irony is i keep saying street action is the only thing that produces concessions but every time you get street violence on television that is like two more tourists gone. it is huge and one of the aspects that is -- that has turned the population against the ongoing protests.

the phrase that keeps popping up that i see in newspapers and i hear from everybody is we have to keep the wheel of production moving. first, i heard of us thought was hilarious. a weird stalinist handover of the term. but it is important. people are listening to that and they think the protesters are holding up the wheel of production. they think they are holding the country hostage for there is irrational demands. irrational demands. it is not great. perception of insecurity is very bad. the curious thing to me is people blame the protesters for the lack of security and i get into these, they don't blame the police for not showing up for their job. i have had these arguments with

people in egypt where they act like it is the protesters's fault. i missed the part where we kill 100,t wh0 police officers. they are sitting at home. why you not mad at them? why are you not yelling to get these people back on the job? there is a -- it needs to right itself fairly quickly. i am not optimistic that it will. it is one of the lafor concerns. >> i spent ten years in poland starting in 1990. the average wage was $35 a month for everybody. but the whole system collapsed. they had no choice but to start over. i am curious about robust

tourism. there was still this economic inequality and people who couldn't afford to have good jobs or get good jobs after they got their degrees to move out. with a country that is still very the country hasn't collapsed. you don't have an opportunity or obligation to start over again. i don't know how to go about rebuilding an economy not just to get the old economy back but to rebuild its owner of the water opportunity for everybody. >> i will say a couple things quickly. and action will genuine fear and enforceable anti-corruption crusade is going to make a difference. not only less money will disappear but that will encourage foreign investment. there's a whole host of multinational corporations, speaks volumes about how attractive the market is,

willing to play the part% to 20 corruption tax overhead just to do business in egypt. those companies still want to do business in egypt. we reduce it by 50%. if it is only part% of the mone that this appears that will be an improvement and that is not taking into account the medium-sized businesses -- we can't afford the corruption over that. you can fix things in a way that brings more money in and keeps more money in the public sphere. actual t% t collection. the only taxes that are collected is if you're in mu's ainatiowholl big cohosorat taken from your paycheck. income-tax, not really. not really. so many loopholes. i even know the percentage. there are wovers of properly running country will have economic profit.

>> if you are to run those campaigns the status quo that is emefor protest for anti-corruption? toward the minister of economics about corruption? there is a conflict. i am going -- conscious of the fact we only have five minute and i will take a couple questions. >> there the policy debate whether we should recognize the responsibility of camp david or if that should be used as a

method with some of those who are here at present to make sure they keep to their commitments. is that a good or capable enough tool to keep the attention of the staff? second question you talk about hosni mubarak, no one has talked about -- talk about the field marshal and how he is playing a staff and is he the right guy to transition staff out of a job? >> yes, thank you. eric from the international monetary fund. just to continue on the theme of the economy. as you know the egyptian authorities are discussing with the imf and other international organizations a possible package of financial assistance. my question to the panel is how

do you see the role -- the potential role of the imf and other international financial organizations in supporting financially the egyptian transition avoiding a crisis at using the egyptian themselves, ready to accept a role for the imf and others, recalling that in june there was a package of assistance worth $3 billion signed and sealed that was rejected by the authorities? interesting to hear your view on that. >> i will make a few points. $1.3 billion. obviously there have been contacts between president obama -- have to reverse the deals

impacting the worst with the prohibition on some members to the country. at some level the egyptian military can't even imagine that money because it is so much a part of the camp david architecture and they believe america's strategic interest has this relationship with the citizenry. i suspect they believe ultimately people will all be fine. they may be more aware now that the decision on the mood on the hill is not particularly favorable right now. particularly because of very egregious steps they took. difficult instead to use. it could be quite disastrous. i heard some egyptians tell me

over time they are prepared to live without a $2.2 billion that helps the economy just as much because it has to be spent in the u. s. i suspect that for now they will find a way out of this. it may be a taste of things to come. i am not sure that is anyone doing the job they're prepared for. i would not say the issue was born and bred to be the transition of egypt from military -- as we were discussing earlier the mismanagement we partner you know you will make a concession, make it when it looks like you are doing it magnanimously, not under pressure. my sense is we will have to see what happens after june and july to have that position. some people say leave and other

people say the decision to run for president which i kind of doubt. the military leadership is dealing with a deck of cards is not familiar with and protect -- transitioning to the role which from their perspective would give them the power they hope will leave them with the power they want without the responsibilities they fear. >> are like what robber was saying. the military is coming to groups that have a relationship with the pentagon is not enough. they're starting to understand, not as good as it was a year ago. and in fact important. they're not quite sure what to do with that. >> using military funding is a lever respect as robb said that

it would not take that threat credibly. may take it at the end of the day the money is going to come from america. i am not sure -- i don't know where i heard about that if you are right about that or not. how is used illegal public perception, in the activist community, the, quote, camp david money, they don't think it is important at all. i know many longtime activists argue passionately that it is worth walking away from camp david. the camp david money is overrated. i am not sure how many people, fairly suddenly appeared downtown wearing a suit, shaking

hands, kissing babies, acting for all intents and purposes like a man running for political office. nobody knew what to make of that. trial ballooning or something but at the end of the day a guy is more than from -- supersymbolic of the old regime. just before the revolution. stay in power, the man that leave the country forward, a lot of speculation about the officers just below him. and the chief of staff would be his title and he was in america when the revolution kicked off and he is an interlocutor between cairo and d.c. the former head of the air force

reserve briefly, the last prime minister a couple weeks after the revolution. not active military. it is on his last legs. >> we have to close now. they were going to stick around. we have books out in the lobby. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] >> is there a nonfiction authors or book you like to see featured? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org or tweak as at twitter.com/booktv. >> by 2016 according to the imf, the world's leading economy will be a communist dictatorship. that is in five years time. think about that. the guy you election next november will be the last president of the united states to preside over the world's leading economy. >> mark stein has published nine book. his latest, after a america is a new york times best-seller. he writes the happy warrior column for the national review and is a frequent guest host on rush limbaugh's radio show. live sunday on in-depth your chance to call, e-mail and sweet with your questions live at noon eastern on booktv on c-span2. >> let me preface my talk about

kurt vonnegut by reading the first page of the prologue that will serve as a spring board for what i have to say to you about his life and his work and the relationship had with him, our friendship. this is from the prologue out of print and scared to death and it starts like this. kurt vonnegut planned to give this new teaching job at the university of iowa his best shot. he is doomed to cross the midwest in early september of 1965 in his sun's new volkswagen beetle, frame pressing against his head and pressing is head against the roof line. of failure were clattering behind him like tin cans tied to the bumper. the ashtray was stuffed with crushed butts of cigarettes and the windshield was tarnished with nicotine from chain-smoking. he had a lot to think about. in the 1200 mile cross-country drive between his home on cape cod and i was city gave him all the time he needed. he was bored by his 20 year

marriage to his first love, gamecock who he married barely five months after his release from prisoner of war camp in world war ii. this past summer he had been trying to start an affair with a woman in new york 20 years his junior who in turn was waiting for william price to divorce his wife to marry. is this writer in president's job and respected by or writer's workshop he was going to leave its and compensate himself for his trouble by coming on strong with sarah. on the other hand he would remind her he was just an old blues count on the hunt for affection and she was just a girl and he was old enough to be her father. she needed him like a shingle. why start a book like that? in the middle of a man's life? because kurt vonnegut wasn't famous leaders who wasn't popular until he was almost 50 years old. for the first part of his writing life the majority of it,

kurt vonnegut was a free-lance writer who was writing fiction for popular magazines like collier's and ladies' home journal, saturday evening post and barely making it. he had a large family of six children, they lived in a big ramshackle house on cape cod and he was living paycheck to paycheck to try to put food on the table. he not only wrote stories but tried teaching special education for a semester. that did not go well. he received an inheritance from his father and decided he should go into selling automobiles. because he thought it was an ideal job for writer. put the new cars in the show room and you could sit in the back and write all day. he lost his shirt. he was not doing well in 1965 when he went to iowa for the iowa writers workshop. jump ahead a few years to when he swims into the view of a generation. since 1969, a college student at

the university of illinois, draft eligible, facing the war in vietnam and like so many young men my age our fathers fought in world war ii so we were facing a moral dilemma. would we serve? where did our duty law? would we fight? what if we didn't feel we could? what do we do instead? suddenly breaking like a storm over us is what -- slaughterhouse 51969. we embrace it because we were feeling disoriented and bewildered, not knowing what we would do and in slaughterhouse 5, a private trying to be a good soldier who doesn't know what is happening that is suffering from this strange phenomenon worthy ricochets around in time. looking back we know it was probably a manifestation of

post-traumatic stress disorder which was not diagnosed at that time. he finds himself talking to rotary and someone will say something and he is back in the battle of the ball flying in the snow. and back in front of rotary and in his office and then somewhere on a farm. the far end of the universe where he is safe and there's someone who loves him and time has no meeting and then he is back again. and this book with its non chronology and its flashbacks to this droll humor and moments of terror seemed to capture one lot of us were feeling. when i finished mockingbird:a portrait of harper lee and was looking around for another subject i wanted to know who hasn't had a biography written about him or her? and who had a big impact on people my age? kurt vonnegut came to mind right away and i was surprised that he

had never had a biography written about him and it turned out he was a little miffed that nobody had ever taken the time. half a century of writing and 14 books in print and nobody had ever written a biography of him. i wanted to find out who was kurt vonnegut, the author of a book that became so popular so suddenly because he was out of print as i say in the prologue and by 1970 had a body of work that was self defeated from the ash heap like god bless you, mr. rosewater and tyrants of titan and catch's cradle. he had a lot of work suddenly whereas before he had been just somebody who wrote paperback books that ends up in drugstores and bus stations next to mr. lucky and conan the barbarian. suddenly he is the next great literary thing. >> you can watch this and other

programs at booktv.org. >> next phillip boyce said down with booktv to discuss his book "the congressional budget office". the interview is part of booktv's college series. >> host: we are at the university of maryland talking to professors who are also offers. we are joined by philip joyce whose book is called congressional budget office: honest numbers, power, and policymaking". professor joyce. original one was cbo formed? >> guest: in 1974. and was in fact it reaction to some of the perceived accesses by the nixon administration. part of an effort by the congress to reassert its role in the budget process and as a part of that they created a budget committee and budget resolution that if they were going to be

equal players in the budget process they really needed to have their own budget agency as opposed to relying on numbers that came from the executive branch and that is the reason. >> host: has it been successful? >> guest: it has been phenomenally successful and its success is mostly measured by the fact that if you talk to most people in the media and most people if they are being honest with you on both sides of the aisle would say the congressional budget office at least concerning the budget probably has the most credible numbers, most credible information out there. that was not a foregone conclusion. it was not something that necessarily was destined to happen. if you had said to someone in 1974 we are going to create a nonpartisan agency in the middle of the most partisan imaginable environment. is that going to work? a lot of people would have said

no. but it was made to work and they worked hard on making it work on that score it was successful. >> host: what is the cbo's mission? >> guest: to provide nonpartisan information on the economy and the budget to the congress and increasingly to the public as well. that was not as anticipated when the cbo was formed. there's lots of access that individual members of the public and the media now have that they did not have before and other sources and increasingly its mission has broadened to serving the congress. the non-partisan nature of the cbo's work is crucial and the law that created the cbo said only that the director and cbo

staff should be appointed without regard to partisan affiliation but the first director, a giant of public service, really created a culture, being appointed without regard to personal affiliation to doing their work in a non-partisan manner. the director of the cbo is appointed by the speaker of the house and the president pro tem for of the senate who all c-span viewers know is a member of the majority party with the greatest amount of seniority. practically speaking it is the ranking members of the house and senate budget committees who are most responsible for selecting the cbo director. there have been eight directors since its formation. four of them have been nominal democrats.

four have been normal republicans. what they all have in common is they are card-carrying middle of a road, people who you would consider to be relatively moderate members of their parties even though they are nominal -- >> host: who is the current director? >> guest: doug eleanor. this is his third year. he was very active. what most people who know about the cbo know about director e e elmendorff that he was all over the place during the debate on the obama health care reform. wind cbo became the crucial arbiter of whether the health care reform would actually add to the deficit or subtract from the deficit. >> host: you write in your book that because of cbo's they put off action in the health-care bill.

>> guest: that is correct. if the health care reform had not been viewed as something that had to at least be deficit neutral then i think cbo would not necessarily have had as import they roll as it had but once you say one of the things you are concerned about and president obama himself elevated cbo to this stature by saying that he would not sign a bill that added to the deficit, that really meant it was a much higher hurdle for bills to get over that had not been true and certainly there were delays at various stages of the process because the congress was waiting to find out whatever their latest version was could sort of pass the cbo test. >> host: doug elmendorff used to work for dick gephardt. >> guest: i am not sure of that. it is possible. >> host: is there a professional staff as well at cbo that goes

through administration? >> guest: there is a low-interest lead is not a professional staff like you would find in most federal agencies. and we to respect but dominated by ph.d. economists -- but the other is the cbo staff work at the pleasure of the director. a director could come in and just clean house on day one if they wanted to and in that respect the relationship of the cbo staff and director is like that between the congressional staff and a member of congress. no director has ever come in and decided to clean house on day one because there's a lot of expertise obviously that reside in the cbo staff. so the practice has been for cbo staff to stay from one director to another but that is because that is what the directors have chosen to do.

actually one case when june o'neill was cbo director appointed just after the republicans went back to congress in 1994, the assumption was she was going to clean the place out. the house republicans, the leadership in the house very much wanted her to do that. they assumed because cbo staff had been there for a long, democratic rule that must mean they were giving comfort to the democrats. the senate republicans, particularly pete they medici --domenici did not want that to happen much to the surprise of health republicans. >> how big is the congressional budget office? >> it is about two hundred fifty people. its budget is somewhere in the

neighborhood of $25 million or $30 million. but it is not a big agency. in fact it has an awful lot more influence than you would think an agency of 250 people would have. >> host: why was alice rivlin so important in the early days? >> guest: she was important because she had a clear vision for what she wanted the agency to do. and she set out to make the organization in that image and she was pretty stubborn about it in the sense that she had a vision. she was sometimes pushed by members of congress to move in a different direction and she was pretty clear about the direction that she wanted to go in. once she did that, she began to create a culture in the organization and that is one of the most interesting parts to me of the story of cbo.

if it takes something, not only the fact that it was an agency that was supposed to be non-partisan in the middle of a very partisan environment but also the fact that you have this organization that is starting from scratch. if you don't have a model necessarily to go from all you have been told is the new director of cbo created an organization to make it responsive to congress and non-partisan manner. in the first place you have to figure out what that means. to talk about how we know if it has been a successful organization but she had to go out and hire people and to find these people who she thought could work in an organization that would realize this kind of vision. that was an extraordinary thing and she was there for two terms and that made a big difference that she was there for eight years and by the end of 8 years

it was relatively well-established. however it was possible that the second director could come in and change things. the second director was a republican whose name was rudy tender. alan greenspan called him a republican alice rivlin and he behaved that way. he came and and reinforced the things that she had said and once that happened and the next director followed him and did pretty much the same things, they were often running in the sense that once you create a culture you sustain it over 10 or 15 years, it is pretty well ingrained. >> has the cbo been used as a political football in the past? >> absolutely. the one nothing you can say about organizations that produce information, they cannot use that information.

whoever it is might be a supporter or opponents of a particular policy can clearly use a cbo cost estimate to have a bad policy or good policy, the clinton health care reform. in 1993 or 1990 for the cbo came up with a network that the clinton health care reform, saving money which the clinton administration could cost money. that someone could look at, a good reform or a bad reform but people who posted reform grab that particular conclusion and tried to use it to their best end which was to try to see if they could kill the clinton health care reform. >> this is booktv on c-span2 and we're talking to professor

phillip boyce -- joyce about his book "the congressional budget office" recently with the supercommittee. >> one way that was used was to help the supercommittee to set the parameters of what they were going to do. so director elmendorff testified multiple times on the nature of the problem facing the country and what kinds of things would need to happen and what would be a reasonable trajectory for trying to get the deficit down and clearly cbo staff behind-the-scenes work with the supercommittee answering questions. lot of work that cbo does was not visible in the sense that they're providing advice to congressional staff. what would happen if the

supercommittee was successful, would have to score legislative changes the supercommittee came up with to determine whether they met the target that would set for the supercommittee. the supercommittee needed to come up with deficit reduction of $1.2 trillion over ten years to prevent the automatic sequestration, across the board cuts from taking effect if they had gotten that far which we now know they didn't. the cbo would have had to judge whether specific changes they came up with, tax or spending side actually met that target and if it didn't meet that target, one of two things would happen. they would have gone back to the drawing board and added things that would have brought them up to the target or the difference between what they did and the ultimate target would have still been subject to this across the board cut which is what is going

to happen unless the change is made. >> host: what we mean by scoring? >> guest: cbo is required to do cost estimates of every single piece of legislation that goes out of a congressional committee before it can be considered on the floor of the house or the senate. this is a very important role in the sense that what existed prior to that point, there was no one doing cost estimates in a way that you would find trust worthy prior to the creation of the cbo. what would happen is you either have the president's budget office, office of management and budget would do a cost estimate but that wasn't immune from influence in terms of whether the president actually likes this particular bill or didn't like this particular bill or worse yet year life have the sponsor of the particular piece of legislation being the one to do the cost estimates though they had every incentive to

suggest that the cost was lower than it would be in reality. cbo clearly does not get those cost estimates right all the time. no one would get them right all the time. the influence is that people realize that they don't have a particular axe to grind in the debate. they are trying to do what they can to come up with the most accurate cost estimate they can and they are not trying to either help the piece of legislation that passed or help kill the peace of legislation. >> host: as one example where cbo got it wrong and an example where they got it right. >> i will tell you one example they got it wrong and everybody got it wrong which was in 2001 when president bush came into office. one of the things cbo does is projections of the outlook for

the federal budget and those projections have sometimes covered five years but increasingly they cover ten years so when president bush came into office there is an estimate from cbo that said left to its own devices under current law the budget surplus cumulatively would be $5.6 trillion and has all cbo estimates are that was not a prediction but it was a projection based on the best information they had. if anybody should know for further out you make a projection of anything less accurate it is going to be so that was really the mid point of the range and a pretty big range but it did support those who thought was important for the congress and president to cut

taxes at that point. the tax cuts that were enacted were helped by the fact that there was this projection which clearly was wrong. there were predictions from elsewhere that were wrong as well. among the things it didn't predict was the recession that started soon after that. also didn't predict september 11th which no one really did and there were fiscal effects coming out of september 11th. in terms of something cbo got right and this is something that also illustrates the limits of any analytical agency, cbo for many years, probably 15 years was producing reports and analyses that were warning about what might happen if the government sponsored enterprises, fannie mae and freddie mac ever got in a situation where they didn't have enough capital and really needed to come to the federal government for a bailout. their position this entire time was that will never happen.

as part of what happened with the financial crisis in 2008 and beyond the federal government had to take over fannie mae and freddie mac at the cost of 200 or $300 billion to the federal budget. this was clearly a case where cbo had it right. not that this would inevitably happen but there were particular things that are congress should do in legislation in order to protect the federal government against the potential that something like this would happen. >> host: the federal budget process has broken down in congress. the appropriations were passed as required by law and continued resolutions. what has been cbo's role if any in that process? >> cd and -- cbo's role is to support the process.

one thing i was a little uncomfortable talking about the success of the cbo because i'm talking about the success of an organization in the middle of a process no one would say is successful and part of that is the limit of what any organization whose job it is to provide information can do. what the cbo has been doing in that process is what the cbo always those which as congress continues to consider legislation it provides information on the effects of that legislation. doesn't really have any role to play in trying to force the congress or get the congress to do something congress does not want to do. one important thing alice rivlin did when she set up the organization and this was the working definition of what it means to be non-partisan is she said the congressional budget office will not make recommendations. it was described to me once as someone said if you asked cbo how much some because they will

tell you how much something costs. if you ask if it is a good idea they will tell you how much it costs. even though i would agree with you or anyone else who says the budget process is dysfunctional i am not sure how much cbo can do about that. other than to try to eliminate the effects of the failure to engage in various kinds of policies whether it is deficit reduction. >> host: what do you teach at the university of maryland? >> guest: we have a general course on public budgeting which covers all levels of government in our public policy program and i teach that course which is required of most of our students and we actually have a semester long course believe it or not on the federal budget. i also teach a semester long course on the federal budget which simultaneously makes the

students probably more illuminated and more disillusioned than they were. >> host: you worked at the congressional budget office. >> i worked at the congressional budget office from 1991-96. relieve the reason i wrote the book was because of how impressed i was as someone who came from the outside when i work for their. i wanted to give it some time. i didn't start writing the book right away. i waited a number of years because i wanted to have enough distance that i thought i could be more objective but nobody had written a book on cbo. i knew a lot of the people and i was pretty sure i could get the directors to talk to me but moreover i thought it was a story that needed to be told. there four books on omb and i thought was a travesty at some level that there was not a book

on cbo. became easier to convince publishers who are important to book enterprises that such a thing was an important thing to do once cbo was so heavily involved in the obama healthcare reform because there was the beginning part of the pitch which is why should anybody care that i really didn't have to make at that point. >> host: i read your book and hopefully quoting correctly that the congressional budget office is where legislation goes to die. >> that was senator widen from oregon who said that. the history of health care reform is bill goes to the congressional budget office to die. the irony is there was a health care reform after that point that was an active but what he had in mind mostly was the clinton health care reform of 1994 where it became part of the

war that it was the cbo cost estimate and report on that particular legislation that killed it. there were a lot of things that killed at and that was certainly one of them. anybody who lived for that episode came away with the perception that cbo was a powerful organization that could kill something that could be killed -- >> host: newt gingrich said last month, a reactionary socialist -- given to statement that can be extreme from time to time. one of the most interesting things about that to me, i talked to people in the cbo with close contact with him during the time that he was speaker of

the house. what they said to me was things that actually made him the angriest were that periodically he would have bills that would add particular procedures to medicare covered by medicare and cbo would score those as costing money. his argument was these will save lives. how can they cost money? it can be true simultaneously that something costs the federal budget money and also can save lives. the other thing some republicans and i don't know if this is what he had in mind often turn to and upsets them about cbo is cbo does not consistently believe cutting taxes necessarily will pay for itself. when you lower tax rates it doesn't necessarily lead to so much economic growth that it is not a loss in revenue.

and also affect that cbo said the health care reform would make things better in terms of the overall budget outlook. it is an article of faith among many in the republican party that the obama health care reform made things worse as opposed to making them better and it could be a legitimate difference of opinion but that was not the conclusions cbo came to. >> host: have there been any scandals in cbo history? >> host: depends on what you mean by scandal. i'm not aware of any scandal involves cbo staff. there was a mini scandal in one of the early years because alice rivlin had been driving staff from the cbo building which is off of capitol hill up to capitol hill using her private automobile and 1-year cbo asked

for car and it came out in the press that she wanted a chauffeured limousine and created a great brouhaha in the press that there was never a chauffeured limousine and for 20 years after that there was language in cbo appropriation that said no money could be used for the purchase of a passenger vehicle and that was coming out of that particular event. wikipedia >> host: any bad numbers that got cook the little better? >> guest: there certainly are numbers that people didn't like and certainly people will argue whenever there are numbers people don't like that those numbers were cooked. i was not able in researching my book to find any evidence of numbers that were actually cooked as opposed to one that would just wrong which is a different story entirely. cbo will tell you that the only thing they know about their budget projection is they are

wrong. they just don't know by what amount and in what direction. because they are inherently fraught with error and so many things can make them -- >> host: we began by talking about whether cbo was successful. what happened to the information they provide? >> people actually believe, they're trying to provide without political spin. i often have difficulty convincing people this is actually true because they think what i am arguing is these people are somehow purer than the rest of us. that they don't have opinions. not that they don't have opinions, they do not view it as their job to have their opinions

and into their official work and i think the main reason for that is because cbo directors and also cbo staff figured out at a particular point in time that if they became viewed as one more partisan voice in washington no one would pay attention to them and nobody really likes to work for an analytical institution that no one pays attention to. what makes them different is they are viewed as non-partisan and that gives them their influence and the minute they became used -- viewed as another partisan voice in washington people stop listening. >> host: university of maryland. we have been talking with philip joyce, a professor of management and finance who has also written this book, "the congressional budget office: honest numbers, power, and policymaking" published by georgetown university press. >> guest: thanks very much. >> you a