Free Republic

The Congressional Budget Office in a new report: When [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] was being considered, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that it would increase budget deficits by $787 billion between fiscal years 2009 and 2019. CBO now estimates that the total impact over the 2009–2019 period will amount to about $831 billion. By CBO’s estimate, close to half of that impact occurred in fiscal year 2010, and more than 90 percent of ARRA’s budgetary impact

Tax hikes and spending cuts set to take effect in January would suck $607 billion out of the economy next year, plunging the nation at least briefly back into recession, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday. Unless lawmakers act, the economy is likely to contract in the first half of 2013 at an annualized rate of 1.3 percent, the CBO said, before returning to 2.3 percent growth later in the year. Canceling those tax and spending policies would protect the recovery in the short run and encourage more vibrant growth, around 4.4 percent, in 2013, the CBO said. However,...

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Friday that President Obama’s 2013 budget will hurt the economy in the long term, arguing the larger deficits it would produce would reduce the amount of capital available to businesses. After five years, the CBO says, the Obama proposals would reduce economic output by between 0.5 percent and 2.2 percent. Larger deficits caused by the budget would cause the government to issue more bonds, sucking up private capital to finance its debts and thereby reducing the funds businesses could use to expand and hire, the CBO said. An increased tax on capital gains included...

A new estimate from congressional economists says the government will run a $1.2 trillion deficit for the budget year ending just a few weeks before Election Day. It would be the fourth straight year of trillion dollar-plus deficits. The almost $100 billion spike from earlier projections for the fiscal 2012 deficit comes almost exclusively because Congress passed legislation recommended by President Barack Obama to renew a 2 percentage point cut in payroll taxes and jobless benefits for people languishing on unemployment rolls for more than six months.

A new report from the Congressional Budget Office hands critics of the health reform law a great new talking point: Under a worst-case scenario, the law could lead to 20 million people losing their employer-sponsored insurance in 2019. The agency doesn’t think that’s likely, however. The new report, released Thursday, said the agency expects 3 million to 5 million fewer people to have employer coverage each year because of the health reform law. That’s close to the agency’s original estimate, which predicted 3 million people could lose their workplace coverage. But the new report also lays out the worst-case scenarios...

VIDEO AT LINK Conservative economist Thomas Sowell is calling for the abolishment of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) after it revealed this week that Obamacare may cost American taxpayers nearly twice the $940 billion it originally estimated -- $1.7 trillion over the next decade. “I think occasionally the CBO does something that’s useful,” Sowell told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview. “But by and large, I think it should be abolished.” In September 2009, President Obama estimated healthcare reform under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would cost an additional $900 billion over 10 years. The CBO initially projected the...

President Obama's proposed budget would add $6.4 trillion to the nation's deficits over the next decade, according to a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.By 2022, this would bring debt held by the public to $18.8 trillion, or 76.3 percent of the gross domestic product, according to the analysis.Compared with the CBO baseline, Obama's budget would add $3.5 trillion to deficits from 2013 through 2022, both because he would extend many of the Bush tax cuts and increase spending. Overall, spending would be about $1.1 trillion higher than the CBO baseline and revenues would be $2.4 trillion more.On...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The Congressional Budget Office says that Obamacare is gonna cost twice what he told us. The magic number for Obamacare was a trillion dollars. They had to keep that number under a trillion dollars in order to get it passed. I'm not gonna revisit why and I'm not gonna go back through all the details and the minutia and the arm twisting and the games they were playing to get Obamacare passed because they eventually got it passed. They tried toying around with the idea "deeming" it to have been passed, not even voting on it, a...

A new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office states that by 2016, Obamacare will result in 4 million people fewer people getting health insurance coverage from their employers.The estimate is a vast increase from the CBO prediction just a year ago that 1 million would no longer obtain coverage from their employers. And it raises substantial questions about the veracity of one of Obama’s key pledges in selling the health care law – that everyone who wants to keep their current health insurance plan and doctor could do it.It’s not clear how many of the 4 million would be...

Via Philip Klein. The original 10-year price tag, the one that made it "safe" (but not really safe) for Democrats to drop this fiscal atomic bomb, was $940 billion. What happened, you ask? Well, see for yourself:Remember, they gamed this thing so that it wouldn’t take effect until 2014, which means that the cost of the first four years of implementation was essentially zero. That $940 billion figure really represented just six years of cost, not 10, but it was politically invaluable to Democratic messaging in letting them tout the bill as costing less than a trillion dollars. Now that...

Today we, er, celebrate the third anniversary of the 2009 stimulus package’s presidential signature. When Barack Obama applied his signature, he promised that the $800 billion authorized to his administration by a Democratic Congress would allow him to keep unemployment under 8% and revamp the American economy for long-term prosperity and solid economic growth. Yesterday, in an early anniversary present, the CBO scored the performance of the stimulus and the Obama administration on that very metric, and the first paragraph delivers the verdict clearly, emphases mine: The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February...

The Congressional Budget Office released a report Thursday that showed real unemployment in America at 15 percent for the month of January, a figure considerably higher than the White House’s oft-cited 8.3 percent figure that does not include part-time workers seeking full-time work or those who have given up hope of finding a job altogether. From the CBO: Many people would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks, or are working part-time but would prefer full-time work. If those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would...

The Congressional Budget Office released its annual Budget and Economic Outlook this week. Last year’s was a tragedy, but the new one is a horror story. The crushing burden of government debt and persistent unemployment – which, contrary to the carefully massaged statistics released for public consumption, has really been in double digits for years, when the collapsing work force is taken into account – will conspire with skyrocketing taxes after the expiration of the Bush tax rates, and leave us with only 1.1 percent projected GDP growth next year. That will leave us with one of the slowest economies...

For years, the Left led by President Obama and aided by the robots in the media have continued to say there is a growing income gap in America. They say the rich are getting richer and the poor are being left behind. President Obama recently stated in his weekend address to the nation, “Over the past three decades, the middle class has lost ground while the wealthiest few have become even wealthier.” The recent flurry of news stories came as a result of a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that concluded: “From 1979 to 2007, real (inflation-adjusted) average household...

Buried within the Congressional Budget Office's most recent report on the progress of President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a surprising admission: the CBO now estimates the stimulus might have been only half as effective as previously thought. You wouldn't know it from the headlines. "Stimulus added up to 3.3M jobs," reads a representative piece from Politico reporting on the November CBO report. This headline is accurate for the high-end estimate. That estimate, however, is essentially unchanged from previous reports. In the past, the CBO's low estimate for jobs "created or saved" was 1.2 million which, in this...

In short, what the Congressional Budget Office presents as increased inequality from 2003 to 2007 was actually evidence that the top 1% of earners report more taxable income when tax rates are reduced on dividends, capital gains and businesses filing under the individual tax code. If Congress raises top individual tax rates much above the corporate rate, many billions in business income would rapidly vanish from the individual tax returns the CBO uses to measure the income of the top 1%. Small businesses and professionals would revert to reporting most income on corporate tax returns as they did in 1979.

Recovery: After nearly all the stimulus money has been spent, the Congressional Budget Office now admits it cost more than advertised, did less to boost growth and will hurt the economy in the long run. In its latest quarterly report on the economic effects of the Obama stimulus, the CBO sharply lowered its "worst case" scenario while trimming many of its upper-bound estimates for stimulus-fueled growth and employment. The new report finds, for example, that the stimulus may have added as little as 0.7% to GDP growth in 2010 — when spending was at its peak — and created as...

In a blow to the Obama administration, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has concluded that the president’s economic stimulus plan created fewer jobs than expected and “crowds out” private investment. A new report the CBO released on Tuesday finds that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act may have boosted the economy in the short run by sustaining some 700,000 jobs at its peak in 2010 but “will reduce output slightly in the long run — by between 0 and 0.2 percent after 2016.” The report estimates that the total number of jobs the plan produced was far fewer than the...

The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday downgraded its estimate of the benefits of President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, saying it may have sustained as few as 700,000 jobs at its peak last year and that over the long run it will actually be a net drag on the economy. CBO said that while the Recovery Act boosted the economy in the short run, the extra debt that the stimulus piled up “crowds out” private investment and “will reduce output slightly in the long run — by between 0 and 0.2 percent after 2016.” The analysis confirms what CBO predicted before...

NRO's Andrew Stiles flags this exchange from Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf's testimony before the Senate Budget Committee ealier this week: (Insert video segment) The quote that matters starts around 1:25, when Elmendorf says that, according to CBO's estimates, with the stimulus legislation in place, "the level of GDP would be a little lower at the end. That is, a net negative effect on the growth of GDP over 10 years." Elmendorf then confirms that CBO estimates that the economic drag will continue in the following decade: SESSIONS: And in the next 10 years, since you’re carrying that debt...

The economic hardships brought about by the financial crisis and the weak recovery have reopened our longstanding national debate over the meaning of the proposition that we are all created equal. In the Founders' vision, the self-evident truth of this belief guaranteed all Americans equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To Abraham Lincoln, who led America at a time when this belief was most gravely threatened, it meant the equality of opportunity — "the promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an...

Have you been following this so-called supercommittee? They're the new superhero group of superfriends from the super-Congress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multitrillion-dollar abyss. There's Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry) and many other warriors for truth, justice and the American way of debt. The supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic. I had cynically assumed that the superfriends would address America's imminent debt catastrophe...

WASHINGTON - The richest 1 percent of Americans have been getting far richer over the last three decades while the middle class and poor have seen their after-tax household income only crawl up in comparison, according to a government study. After-tax income for the top 1 percent of U.S. households almost tripled, up 275 percent, from 1979 to 2007, the Congressional Budget Office found. For people in the middle of the economic scale, after-tax income grew by just 40 percent. Those at the bottom experienced an 18 percent increase. "The distribution of after-tax income in the United States was substantially...

In order to keep the ongoing class warfare waged by the administration in perspective, today the CBO was kind enough to score the revenue impact of the proposed and much debated Buffett Tax, now appearing in non-populist literature as "Surtax on Millionaires." According to the Budget Office, said tax which is the source of substantial consternation among the population, would generate, over the next decade, a grand total of... drum roll... $453 billion. Why the drum roll? Because as we pointed out a few days ago, the US closed the 2011 fiscal year having added $1.23 trillion in debt (a...

"The U.S. economy added no [net] new jobs in August--the worst showing in a year--as employers cut back hiring and trimmed work hours of existing employees," the Los Angeles Times reports. "The nation's unemployment rate in August stayed at 9.1%, as more people reported that they found part-time work, many of them because that's all that was available." Next week President Obama will speak to a joint session of Congress. As we noted yesterday, the president reportedly will ask Congress to pass a new "stimulus," though he won't call it that, because the last stimulus didn't--oh, wait. "One More Time:...

The jobs created and saved by the economic stimulus law that President Barack Obama signed on Feb. 17, 2009 cost at a minimum an average of $228,055 each, according to data released yesterday by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). ...a report released Wednesday-"Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from October Through December 2010"-the CBO said it now estimates the stimulus law cost a total of $821 billion, up from CBO's original estimate that the stimulus would cost $787 billion. In the same report, the CBO estimated that in the fourth quarter of...

There is nowhere left to hide. America’s governing elites begin to internalize the magnitude of their failure to generate jobs. CBO now predicts worse than 8% unemployment until 2014. America begins to engage, seriously, with the implications of the faltering dollar and reconsider the appeal of the gold standard. From The New Yorker to The National Interest to The Washington Monthly to The Nixon Foundation, thoughts turn to gold

President Obama often tells us that his No. 1 focus is creating jobs, but his record makes you wonder what he might have done differently if his goal were to destroy jobs. Those who've examined Congressional Budget Office data have calculated that each job allegedly created by Obama's stimulus -- and this is if you accept the fantastically generous guesstimates -- cost between $225,000 and $600,000. But that's not the only way in which the administration has shown its virtual contempt for efficient job creation and its callousness concerning job destruction. In the name of compassion, Obama advocates seemingly endless...

There are several things from this new CBO report that probably deserve commentary, including a new estimate that unemployment will “remain above 8 percent until 2014.”Instead, I want to look at the new budget forecast and see what degree of fiscal discipline is necessary to get rid of red ink.

Ken Arrow, the Nobel Prize winning economist, likes to tell a funny anecdote about his time as a statistician in World War II. He and his team were assigned to come up with long term weather forecasts, which they figured out would be impossible for them to do. So they wrote this to their superiors and asked to be relieved of this duty. The response they received was "The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However, he needs them for planning purposes." Times haven't changed much in government and it seems that this is the...

Today we hear about deficit reduction budgets from both sides of the aisle. But what is never discussed are the economic assumptions that accompany deficit reduction budgets. Here is a very good article by James Pethokoukis about economic assumptions and their affects on projections. This post draws heavily upon his article. Economic Assumptions and Their Effects The budget that President Obama proposed on Monday [in July, 2011] is highly dependent on economic growth forecasts for the next decade that are significantly higher than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has projected. Philip Klein at The American Spectator has compared WH...

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office just released its August budget and deficit projections. They predict 2.7% GDP Growth, 8.5% unemployment in 2012 — which Jim Pethokoukis notes, is more bullish than both than expected by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. Some highlights: * $1.284 trillion deficit for the fiscal year ending September 30 — down slightly from the past two years. This is the third-largest deficit in the past 65 years. Better fiscal outlook for the next ten years — assuming current law remains unchanged and the "Super Committee" completes its work. * Deficits from 2012-2020 will run up an...

The United States is facing profound budgetary and economic challenges. At 8.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the $1.3 trillion budget deficit that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects for 2011 will be the third-largest shortfall in the past 65 years (exceeded only by the deficits of the preceding two years). With modest economic growth anticipated for the next few years, CBO expects employment to expand slowly. The unemployment rate is projected to fall from 9.1 percent in the second quarter of 2011 to 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter of the year and to 8.5 percent in the...

Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the nation’s credit rating gives House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan every right to say “I told you so.” Even earlier this week when President Obama was taking his victory lap for the debt-ceiling compromise, Ryan was disclosing the cold, hard truths of the economic troubles that lie ahead — truths that a jittery Wall Street has been more than aware of. In an oped column in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, the Wisconsin Republican reiterated, of course, that the president really has no budget plan. “The president’s February budget,” he wrote, “deliberately dodged the tough...

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Monday confirmed that the debt-ceiling compromise now slowly working its way through a political minefield would cut deficits by at least $2.1 trillion over 10 years. The finding, reported in a letter to Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), is fresh ammunition for supporters of the plan in the face of conservative opposition that the spending cuts are too small. Liberals are also unhappy, arguing that Democrats are caving in to the GOP by not insisting on raising more revenue by closing tax loopholes on the richest. According...

It was only a week ago that S&P said anything under $4 trillion in deficit cuts would be an automatic downgrade for the US. So according to the CBO's just released score of the bipartisan budget, the S&P will have to cut its rating of the US in half, since the total budget cuts will be just over 50% of what S&P demanded previously. And here's the funny part: of the $917 billion in known cuts (the other $1.2 billion is factored but not even the CBO has any clue what it will look like), a whopping 2% in cuts...

The medical costs associated with VHA’s treatment of OCO veterans could, in CBO’s estimation, total between $40 billion and $55 billion over the 10-year period from 2011 through 2020, depending on the number of military personnel deployed to overseas contingencies in the future and the rate of growth of medical expenditures per person. That amount would be in addition to the $6 billion that VHA had spent on OCO veterans’ health care by the end of 2010. VHA is funded by annual discretionary appropriations (unlike Medicare, for example, which is funded by permanent appropriations); therefore, the estimated amounts would only...

We’re hearing it now cuts $917 billion over ten years under the more recent CBO baseline. So under $1 trillion. On the other hand, the cuts are apparently more front-loaded: $20 billion in real cuts in the first year.

Fate of Boehner, Reid Debt Limit Plans UnclearBoehner rewriting plan; Reid plan saves $2.2 trillion says CBO Washington, DCWednesday, July 27, 2011 Debate and a vote on House Speaker John Boehner's (R-OH) debt reduction legislation was postponed at least one day as the Speaker rewrites his bill.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released an analysis of his plan. It says it cuts $850 billion over ten years, less than the $1.2 trillion Boehner claimed it would save.  Additionally, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) also postponed debate of his debt ceiling proposal until at least Thursday. Media reports say he is...

The CBO has just released its analysis of his so-called "Reid plan", which will only generate $2.2 trillion in savings, half a trillion short of the promised $2.7 trillion. But wait, it gets far, far more idiotic. Per the CBO "The caps on appropriations of new budget authority excluding war-related funding start at $1,045 billion in 2012 and reach $1,228 billion in 2021" - that's right: savings from not fighting future wars - a cool trillion. But wait there's more: "The legislation also would impose caps of $127 billion for 2012 and $450 billion over the 2013-2021 period on budget...

Well, so much for that last post. From Table 3 of the CBO’s new scorecard, eyeball the bottom line:

CBO: Boehner plan cuts deficits by $850B By Erik Wasson - 07/26/11 06:03 PM ET The Congressional Budget Office has told House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) that his debt ceiling fallback plan will reduce the deficit by about $850 billion over ten years. House GOP rank-and-file have been waiting eagerly for the score since they are worried the bill would not measure up to claims made about it by House leadership. Leadership on Monday said the bill would reduce discretionary spending by $1.2 trillion over ten years. The CBO revealed the score in a Tuesday letter to the speaker. The...

My husband and I can run our household without spending more than we make. If our budget is running tight we know how to cut out extras. Give us a day to look over the National budget and I bet we could get it figured out. The welfare mamas would not be pleased, but ask me if I give a damn. Ex-CBO Employee - i bet you can not.. RoosGirl - There's plenty of money coming in to the treasury to pay for essentials; welfare - gone, farm subsidies - gone, food stamps - gone, planned parenthood - gone, aid...

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released its long-term outlook for the federal budget. As expected, we are going broke slightly faster than we were a few months ago. No doubt the usual bigger-government types will use this news to repeat the mantra that we need to both cut spending and “enhance revenues” (a thinly veiled euphemism for tax hikes). Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner used this oft-repeated line just this week. But their argument is exactly backwards. The CBO report actually once again proves that no tax hikes are necessary to fix our budget woes. The CBO calculates that if...

A new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) finds that President Obama's economic stimulus program helped nearly double U.S. debt. The 2011 Long-Term Budget Outlook, released Wednesday morning, reports that the "the combination of automatic budgetary responses" and Obama's stimulus "had a profound impact on the federal budget."

CBO: If Politicians Made No Changes, The Debt Problem Would Go Away Joe Weisenthal Jun. 22, 2011, 11:53 AM Today the Congressional Budget Office released its latest forecast for the government debt, and not surprisingly it's pretty grim. You know the drill by now. But it doesn't have to be. This chart shows two lines: The Extended Baseline Scenario and the Alternative Fiscal Scenario. In the baseline scenario, politicians literally sit on their hands. They let the Bush tax cuts expire, they keep indexing the Alternative Minimum Tax higher, and they don't raise Medicare payments to doctors. All of that...

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--Lawmakers may not reach an agreement to tackle the ballooning federal debt until financial markets indicate they are losing confidence in the United States' ability to pay its obligations, former heads of the Congressional Budget Office warned Tuesday. [...] Borrowing rates for the federal government remain at historically low levels, but confidence could erode quickly, Tuesday's panelists said. Douglas Holtz-Eaken, who headed the CBO during the George W. Bush administration, predicted a crisis of confidence in less than two years unless action is made to reduce long-term deficits. Concerns about market confidence could be constructive, some panelists said....

The Daily Caller has learned the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has hired Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin, an Obama administration official who has been key in implementing parts of Obamacare thus far and a large donor to Democrats and liberal groups, to work in its Health and Human Resources (HHR) Office. As CBO’s deputy assistant director of HHR, Buntin is expected to assist with the Office’s prime directive, providing “objective, nonpartisan, and timely analyses to aid in economic and budgetary decisions on the wide array of programs covered by the federal budget.” It may be difficult for Buntin to provide such “objective”...

The Congressional Budget Office confirmed late last week that some who qualify for subsidies to buy health insurance through the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) could see those subsidies shrink starting in 2019. Under a cost-control inserted during reconciliation, a greater share of premium payments would steadily shift to individuals and families after 2018 if exchange subsidies top 0.5% of GDP — as CBO projects they will. In a report trying to clarify this aspect of the law that has bamboozled Medicare’s actuaries and respected health care analysts across the political spectrum,

The federal government notched its 31st straight month in the red in April, though individual income tax receipts are “significantly” higher than expected and made the deficit mush smaller than it otherwise would have been, the Congressional Budget Office said Friday. With the economy looking stronger than expected, income tax receipts are up 26 percent, or $130 billion, over 2010 at this point, the CBO said, calling the inflow “the result of increased amounts withheld from paychecks and strong growth in payments accompanying 2010 tax returns,” which were due last month. The better-than-expected tax revenue, which comes despite last December’s...