Free Republic

Two years after World War I ended -- in fiscal 1920 -- the federal government spent approximately $6,358,000,000, according to Historical Table 1.1 published by the White House Office of Management and Budget. At the same time, it collected approximately $6,649,000,000 in taxes -- and ran a surplus of $291,000,000. When that federal spending of $6,358,000,000 is adjusted for inflation from June 1920 dollars (the last month of that fiscal year) to June 2021 dollars (the latest month that can be calculated using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator), it becomes $82,652,780,000. The 1920 Census discovered that the United...

The federal deficit exceeded $1 trillion in the first five months of fiscal 2021, according to projections from the Congressional Budget Office released Monday. The deficit through February spiked to $1.048 trillion, a $423 billion increase over the same period last year. Spending this year is up 25 percent and revenues climbed 5 percent compared with the previous year.

Amidst all the pre-holiday jockeying over an economic “stimulus” package, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a little-noticed report with big implications. More than 18 months after CBO issued a publication on single-payer health care with very little specificity, last month the budget analysts published a 200-plus page report giving more detail about the potential impact of a move to a government-run health system. Joe Biden claims his administration will not implement a single-payer plan, even though his vice president and Health and Human Services secretary-designate both support the concept. Regardless, CBO’s work provides important context about Democratic health-care proposals,...

CBO’s work provides important context about Democratic health-care proposals, including the end goal for most on the left: a full government takeover of health care.Amidst all the pre-holiday jockeying over an economic “stimulus” package, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a little-noticed report with big implications. More than 18 months after CBO issued a publication on single-payer health care with very little specificity, last month the budget analysts published a 200-plus page report giving more detail about the potential impact of a move to a government-run health system.Joe Biden claims his administration will not implement a single-payer plan, even though...

Elizabeth Warren has a plan for everything. Some of those plans are expensive. With Warren emerging as a front-runner in the Democratic presidential contest, Yahoo Finance tallied the cost of her plans. Altogether, the Massachusetts senator’s agenda would require $4.2 trillion per year in new federal spending, and a like amount in new taxes, if she paid for everything without issuing new debt. The federal government currently spends about $4.4 trillion per year, so Warren’s plans would nearly double federal spending. The Treasury takes in about $3.4 trillion in tax revenue each year, so if Warren levied new taxes to...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s refusal to answer repeated questions at Tuesday night’s debate about how she would fund Medicare for All underscores the challenge she faces finding a politically acceptable means to meet the idea’s huge price tag — a challenge that only intensified today with the release of an eye-popping new study. The Urban Institute, a center-left think tank highly respected among Democrats, is projecting that a plan similar to what Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders are pushing would require $34 trillion in additional federal spending over its first decade in operation. That’s more than the federal government’s total cost...

A trillion here. A trillion there. A trillion-dollar deficit as far as the eye can see.But don't worry. You're not talking about real money. This is Trump money, where reality can be manipulated to reflect anything.So Trump can simply claim the latest CBO report showing deficits beginning in 2020 to hit more than a trillion dollars through 2029, to be fake news. Or a Democratic lie.It's certainly more appetizing to ignore reality than to accept it.CNBC: The U.S. budget deficit is expected to hit $960 billion in 2019, and average a whopping $1.2 trillion per year between 2020 and...

Debt was a much bigger topic of conversation during the Obama administration. Republicans mostly arguing it was reaching a critical level and progressives mostly suggested we shouldn’t worry too much about it (We can always mint that $1 trillion coin). Today the CBO released new long-term projections of federal debt which suggest it will nearly double as a percentage of GDP by 2049: In our extended baseline projections, budget deficits drive federal debt held by the public to unprecedented levels. Debt rises from 78 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019, which is already high by historical standards,...

At the time of this writing, six “Gruber videos” have been released and “gone viral,” as they say in YouTube land. These are the videos of course, in which “Obamacare architect” Jonathan Gruber lets the cat out of the bag on the process of enacting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, aka The Greatest Consumer Fraud Perpetrated on the American People, Ever. Of the many Gruber quotes burning up the internet, I was especially struck by this one, to which Charles Krauthammer refers in a recent article: Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget...

I have spent some three decades railing against faulty budgetary scoring of tax bills, but the latest charade from the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Tax Committee takes the cake. The story of fiscal phony math is so indefensible when it comes to the Trump tax cut that you may not believe it could be true. Alas, it is. The story starts with the CBO forecast in 2017 that over the next decade the national debt will double to 150 percent of GDP in about 20 years. Those are debt numbers that don't have a happy ending – just ask...

With the political world deeply focused on the question of whether the Trump administration comprises a gang of Russian pawns, less attention has been devoted to more mundane questions, such as what ever happened to Trump's economic policy? As it happens, economists are keeping their eye on that ball, and their conclusion is that it's in a bad way. More specifically, they recognize that Trump's policy is aimed heavily at achieving annual economic growth of more than 3%. During the presidential campaign, Trump promised growth of 3.5% a year, and sometimes even 4%. There's no disagreement that a sustained growth...

The Congressional Budget Office is reporting that the federal government took in $515 billion in April. With outlays only $218 billion, the $190 billion surprlus represents the largest in history. What's more, the CBO said that the surplus was $40 billion more than expected. Washington Times: Analysts said they’ll have a better idea of what’s behind the surge as more information rolls in, but for now said it looks like individual taxpayers are paying more because they have higher incomes. “Those payments were mostly related to economic activity in 2017 and may reflect stronger-than-expected income growth in that year,” the...

The long-awaited 2018 edition of the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) Budget and Economic Outlook was released this month. It does not paint a rosy picture of the nation’s fiscal future, projecting $12.4 trillion in additional debt over the next decade. If past estimates are any indicator, however, that doesn’t reflect reality. Without a substantial change to the culture of overspending in Washington, the country’s fiscal situation is likely even worse. Ten years ago, CBO estimated that Congress would run a $151 billion surplus this past fiscal year. Instead, the country ran a $665 billion deficit. That’s in part because CBO conducts its...

The Congressional Budget Office’s budget and economic outlook released this month projects that real Gross Domestic Product will grow by 3.3 percent from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the fourth quarter of 2018. That would mark a 15-year high. “In CBO’s projections, real GDP expands by 3.3 percent this year and by 2.4 percent in 2019,” says the CBO report. “It grew by 2.6 percent last year.” The last time real GDP grew by more than 3.3 percent from the fourth quarter of one year to the fourth quarter of the next was in 2003, when it grew by...

In January 2016, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected economic growth for 2018 to be 2.3% and for 2019 to be 1.9%   Now the office projects that GDP will expand by 3.3% in 2018 and 2.4% in 2019, and then it will slow down.  Why would anyone believe these people's long-term projections when they are frequently so far off on their short-term projections?  Why do the media report the numbers as if they were gospel when they are just guesses? The tax cuts for individuals and corporations are all still in effect until 2025, so why the massive slowdown after just one...

There is an old saying that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and we've learned that again with the Congressional Budget Office and its latest highly misleading fiscal forecast. For years, we've been trying to get the CBO to use real-world scoring that reflects how businesses, workers and financial markets react to changes in tax rates. But no go. This is why the left is having a field day with the CBO's forecast that deficits under President Trump will average a trillion dollars a year for the next decade. This is supposed to be a result of Trump's...

Step one: Scream that the GOP tax reform bill would be a "massive attack" on the middle class.  Step two: Concede that actually yes, nearly all middle income earners would get a tax break under the bill.  Step three: Call for its repeal anyway, effectively demanding a tax increase -- a "massive attack," one might even say -- on middle class Americans and US businesses.  It sounds like Bernie Sanders has picked up the same tax hike hymnal from which Nancy Pelosi was singing last week: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called Monday for the Republican tax law to be repealed...

Congress’ chief scorekeeper said Wednesday it botched some of its original Obamacare estimates, and its employees have to make “trade-offs” as they confront the heavy workload from lawmakers. Keith Hall, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said they were off in their guess for enrollment in Obamacare’s exchanges, though he said so were other analysts. “Sometimes it’s really hard to estimate these things,” Mr. Hall said Wednesday. “Certainly with the exchanges, we were off — we weren’t as far off on things like the actual spending, some other things — but everybody else was as well. We can be off...

Efforts by Republican lawmakers to repeal the Affordable Care Act in recent months have repeatedly collapsed after the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scored the various bills using a closely guarded analytic process done entirely behind closed doors. As Republicans released proposed legislation, the CBO announced its views about its effect on the federal budget and how it would affect the number of people without health insurance but didn’t provide a clear account of how those numbers were reached. The lack of transparency about the basis for the CBO’s findings makes it difficult for either experts or the broader public to...

If you’ve read a newspaper or watched cable news in the last month, you’ve probably seen someone say that the Senate GOP health care bill would “kick 22 million Americans off of their health insurance.” But it’s not true. New information from the Congressional Budget Office—leaked to me by a congressional staffer—shows why. CBO’s faith in the individual mandate’s magical powers For years, the CBO has been convinced—despite real-world experience to the contrary—that Obamacare’s individual mandate is the biggest reason why that law has increased the number of Americans with health insurance. When Senator Barack Obama ran against Hillary Clinton...