Republicans Hate Those Pesky Facts

Bruce Bartlett tees off on a couple of shitty bills coming out of the idiot wing of our federal government, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.  One tries to force in dynamic-scoring at CBO and make CBO less able to do its work.  The other tries to whitewash inflationary increases out of the CBO's baseline budget:

The only purpose of this legislation is to obfuscate the effect of inflation on spending so that it will be easier for Republicans to slash it without appearing to do so. They can hold constant spending for programs they don’t like, but are afraid to cut openly, and simply let inflation do their dirty work, while claiming that they haven’t cut spending at all.
This is part of a long-term effort to eliminate data collection or pervert it so that policy is biased toward Republican priorities. For example, Republicans have:

• Forced the Internal Revenue Service to drop a program called the Taxpayer Compliance Measurement Program in order to make the extent of tax evasion harder to calculate. This has made it easier to cut the IRS budget. 
• Abolished the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations because they often produced widely respected data that conflicted with Republican dogma on issues such as global warming.
• Prohibited the federal government from collecting data on the cost of gun-related injuries and death in order to prevent it from being used by gun control supporters.
• Are currently attempting to defund a Census Bureau program called the American Community Survey. Among other things, it would eliminate the government’s ability to properly calculate the unemployment rate. Republicans claim it is too intrusive.

There are many other examples as well. It’s almost as if Republicans instinctively distrust any fact that conflicts with what they want to believe. Thus during the 2012 campaign, many Republicans simply refused to believe polls showing Mitt Romney losing to Barack Obama. A few also accused the Bureau of Labor Statistics of doctoring data showing that the unemployment rate was falling.

Republicans should not be let anywhere near positions of power.  Their war on data and facts is crippling the ability of the government to function properly, so they can turn around and say, "see, government doesn't work."  I don't understand why so many people fall for their crooked scam.