The Congressional Budget Office's mandate is to provide publicly accessible non-partisan budgetary and fiscal review of proposed legislative actions. Its key effort is to identify costs and deficit impacts over a period of time.
This proposal vastly expands the CBO mandate to measure many more cultural impacts. It's purpose is to support legislative initiatives beyond economic focus. It is an adjunct to our recommendation of redirecting the Congressional purpose to be impact investors utilizing investor tools such as targets, milestones, mid-course corrections, tracking and calibration analytics, and built-in stabilizers.
This enhanced mandate suggests that the CBO name be changed to the Congressional Impact Office (CIO).
Cultural Transactions
It is recognized that all transactions – monetary, products, services, barter, etc. – have a varying degree of cultural impact with a varying degree of value – ranging from very destructive to very beneficial.
The work done by policymakers is a significant driver of cultural transactions and should be measured or scored for a broad spectrum of value in addition to economic impacts.
Enhanced Scoring
There are 3 core tenants of enhanced scoring:
Need A difficult but necessary measure of the cultural value of an initiative to avoid narrowly targeted earmarks and leveraged capital pressure.
Capacity A fundamental shift in money supply management and price control where the emphasis is shifted from “how to pay for it” to “how to resource it”.
Acceptance This is a recognition that social and human behavior can have an effect on how accepting people are at adopting initiatives.
Scoring Elements
In addition to the current monetary and fiscal scoring deliverables, CIO will provide the following measures:
Climate – energy, carbon embodiment, entropy, resource extraction
Civil and Cultural Value – UN Sustainable Development Goals
Capital Balance – capital transference and concentration
Resource Capacity – production, labor, natural resources, distribution
Acceptance – Individual and social behavior
Adoption
CBO was established in 1974 to reassert Congress’s constitutional power over the budget. Today, our cultural complexity has expanded dramatically to include climate crisis, capital inequality, social polarization, population insecurities, and political intransigence. CIO is designed to provide the measurements necessary to make proper legislative decisions that this complex world demands. To that end a new bill must be introduced to expand the CBO mandate as a powerful tool for lawmakers to reassert true civil stewardship and deliver universal wellbeing.