On the program today, a little budget math, the housing inheritance, and the T-word.

From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdal, Monday today, January 6th. Good as always to have you along, everybody.

The 119th Congress is, as you know, seated and getting about the business of governing.

Republicans in control of both chambers are figuring out the best way to get done what they want to get done,

including right near the top of the list, taxes, extending the 2017 tax cuts, to be precise.

It's important to note here that no matter what you hear from the GOP, no tax cut in the

history of tax cuts has ever paid for itself. So how to massage the math on a tax package, the

Congressional Budget Office and other outside groups figure is going to add something like

$4 to $6 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. That math is of interest. And as marketplace's

Kimberly Adams reports to get us going, some want to convince the CBO at least to change the way

it makes its calculations. One way to make an expensive piece of legislation look cheaper, on paper at

least, is something called dynamic

scoring. See, normally when the Congressional Budget Office is scoring the cost of legislation,

CBO takes into account how individuals would respond to policies, but they don't take into account

the effect on the larger economy. Chris Towner is with the Washington think tank, the committee

for a responsible federal budget. But the way that tax cuts especially work and especially

changes the tax policy that are very large is they do affect the broader economy quite a bit.

And so groups like the Republican House Freedom Caucus want estimates of economic growth

to be factored in as well, offsetting some of the cost. Philip Rocco teaches political science

at Marquette University. Dynamic scoring is a way of estimating the costs of tax cuts by taking

into account the feedback effects that tax cuts have on the economy.

The problem with this strategy, argues Rocco, is that if politicians still don't like the number

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