> In the Dutch electoral system, this can’t happen. Two months before the elections, every political party is expected to submit a detailed budget plan to a non-partisan agency called the Central Plan Bureau (CPB), which plays a role similar to the Congressional Budget Office in America. The CPB produces an analysis of the economic consequences of those budget plans. The effects are assessed in detail for 2013-2017, and there’s also a prognosis for 2040 to discourage parties from larding up their budgets with short-term candy that leads to negative long-term consequences.
> What the comparison with the American example points out, though, is that, for all the current media scepticism, the mechanism of the CPB evaluation dramatically raises the caliber of the electoral debate in the Netherlands.
>The point is, it is simply impossible, in the Netherlands, for a political party to end up systematically ignoring math and accounting the way the Republicans have at least since George Bush’s campaign in 2000.
Don’t expect to ever see anything like this in the US but we should have official independent analysis of what candidates claim.
[Talking crap in Holland v America](http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/08/fact-checkers)
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