Place your bets on how long before the GOP turns on CBO Director Doug Elmendorf?

From Steve Benen:

When the Congressional Budget Office tells the GOP what it wants to hear, the party loves the office and finds it credible. When analyses offer discouraging news, Republicans consider the CBO useless.

With this in mind, I'd be surprised if Republicans didn't try to shut down the CBO entirely, or at least fire its director, after today.

CBO Director Doug Elmendorf testified before the Senate Budget Committee today and dropped something of a bombshell. Extending the Bush tax cuts, he said, will "probably reduce income relative to what would otherwise occur in 2020." The reason is simple: Debt.

Elmendorf doesn't deny that tax cuts stimulate the economy. But they don't stimulate it that much, he says, and over the long run, the net economic growth from the tax cuts will be quite small. The net deficit impact won't be. "Lower tax revenues increase budget deficits and thereby government borrowing," Elmendorf said, "which crowds out investment, while lower tax rates increase people's saving and work effort; the net effect on economic activity depends on the balance of those forces." [...]

So the bottom line is that extending the tax cuts indefinitely would hurt the economy. The less you extend the tax cuts, the less damage you do to the economy.