Your proposal that all tax and spending programs be considered permanent in the baseline would make sense prospectively IF the same principal was applied in scoring legislation as well. Otherwise you'd create an even larger incentive to have new tax or entitlement policies sunset after a couple of years to limit their costs for purposes of PAYGO and then come back and extend the program permanently for free because they are assumed in the baseline. In order to maintain any discipline the baseline and scoring rules must account for the costs of policies either when they are enacted or when they are extended. As the previous poster noted, the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were sunset in 2010 to reduce the costs of the legislation in order to fit within budget limits -- an effort to pour six pounds of sugar into a five pound bag. The authors of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts didn't object to CBO assuming the tax cuts would expire in the estimates they prepared whenn the legislation was being considered, because that allowed them to enact a larger tax cut than would have been possible if the estimates assumed the tax cuts were permanent. Entitlement programs currently are treated the way you suggest, but both when the policies are originally enacted as well as the baseline for extensions. the exception is programs with a hard sunset date written in a way to avoid the rules requiring CBO to consider the program to be permanent. In that case, the costs of the legislation are reduced by the sunset (and therefore the savings necessary to offset the costs for PAYGO are lower) but the program is not continued in the baseline and extending the program would be scored as increasing the deficit. The farm bill Congress recently enacted is a good example of this. The bill reauthorized various agricultural programs and the food stamp program for five years, but for the most part CBO scored the costs of the bill over ten years as if the policies continued after the authorization expired. It was that CBO estimate that assumed spending continued after the authorization expired that was used for enforcing PAYGO. The exception was several programs that were scheduled to expire earlier and included a hard sunset. In those instances the sunset helped lower the cost of the bill, but also meant that those programs weren't in the baseline. Negotiators talked about whether or not they wanted to "pay for baseline" for certain programs by being charged with the full cost of the program as if it were permanent when the farm bill passed in order to make it easier to continue the program when the farm bill was reauthorized. In fact, there were several programs created in the 2002 farm bill that had hard sunsets used to limit the cost of the bill that were scored as new spending increasing the deficit when they were reauthorized last year. I share your hope that Congress and the next administration can have a bipartisan discussion about updating baseline rules to establish a consistent, common sense standard going forward. But that discussion should not be used to reward policies that were enacted by exploiting the old rules now that the bill has come due.