Showing posts with label Congressional Budget Office. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Congressional Budget Office. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

We get the gov't we vote for!

June 17, 2015 Congressional Budget Office , Joseph Lawler 0 Comments
Budget Office: U.S. Debt Picture Has 'Worsened Dramatically'

By Joseph Lawler, Jun. 16, 2015, Washington Examiner

Congress' budget office again warned that the U.S. faces a massive debt problem Tuesday, using stark language to describe the government's long-term mismatch between spending and revenues even as it slightly upgraded its projections for debt over the next 25 years.

"The long-term outlook for the federal budget has worsened dramatically over the past several years, in the wake of the 2007-2009 recession and slow recovery," the Congressional Budget Office reported in its long-term budget outlook for 2015 released Tuesday.

The Budget Office, a nonpartisan in-house think tank for Congress, projected that the federal debt is set to rise from 74 percent of economic output today to 103 percent by 2040, driven by spending on government healthcare and retirement programs and interest payments on the debt.


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Wednesday, January 28, 2015

On automatic pilot

January 28, 2015 Congressional Budget Office , Debt 0 Comments
Federal Debt Will Explode Over Next 10 Years, CBO Says

Kevin G. Hall, Jan. 26, 2015, McClatchy DC

By 2025, the annual budget deficit is forecast to hit 4 percent of the overall economy, much higher than the 2.7 percent historical average.

The federal government is expected to spend $277 billion on interest on the debt in the current fiscal year. That’s projected to soar to $827 billion by 2025. As a percentage of the economy, it would more than double from 1.3 percent in 2015 to 3 percent in 2025.

Read more: www.mcclatchydc.com

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Saturday, January 17, 2015

SCOTUS Showdown Over Obamacare--Obama will lose

January 17, 2015 CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf , Congressional Budget Office 0 Comments
Analysis: CBO Contradicted The Latest Case Against Obamacare 68 Different Times

Sarah Kliff, Jan. 16, 2015, Vox

The Congressional Budget Office wrote 68 reports about the Affordable Care Act during the session that Congress debated the law. Not one of them, a new analysis from Harvard University's Theda Skocpol, ever explored the possibility of limiting insurance subsidies to the state marketplaces after the law's full implementation.

Read more: www.vox.com

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Thursday, August 28, 2014

But, but Obama says we're back

August 28, 2014 Congressional Budget Office , GDP 0 Comments
CBO Revises 2014 DOWN

By Guy Benson, Aug. 28, 2014, Townhall.com

When the economy shrinks substantially over the course of an economic quarter, tepid recoveries tend to look, well, tepid. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has slashed its predictions for US economic growth in 2014:

The Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday forecast that the U.S. economy will grow by just 1.5 percent in 2014, undermined by a poor performance during the first three months of the year.The new assessment was considerably more pessimistic than the Obama administration's, which predicted last month that the economy would expand by 2.6 percent this year even though it contracted by an annual rate of 2.1 percent in the first quarter...Even with the [Q2] rebound, economists have lowered their outlook for the entire year, given the weak start. Economists at JPMorgan Chase are forecasting that the economy will grow by 1.9 percent this year, when measured from the fourth quarter, down from 3.1 percent in 2013.

US Gross Domestic Product grew at a sluggish 1.9 percent rate in FY 2013. The new 2014 forecasts reflect the ongoing reality of America's historically weak economic recovery under President Obama. Policies matter. The CBO also updated its projections on annual deficits and the national debt. The latter measure has ballooned by $7 trillion and counting since Obama took office, far eclipsing the debt accrual of all other presidents. The bookkeepers determined that this year's deficit will exceed half-a-trillion, an improvement over Obama's abysmal baseline, but that trouble lies ahead. Reason's Peter Suderman summarizes the latest findings:

Read the full story:  www.townhall.com

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Saturday, June 7, 2014

CBO Quietly Drops Forecast That Obamacare Will Cut The Deficit --Move along, nothing to see

June 07, 2014 Congressional Budget Office , Obamacare 0 Comments
By Eric Painin, Jun. 5, 2014, The Fiscal Times

One of the Obama administration's major selling points in passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010 was a Congressional Budget Office forecast that the controversial legislation would reduce the deficit by more than $120 billion over the coming decade.

The CBO has consistently projected that President Obama's overhaul will reduce the deficit, and the agency estimated that the Republicans’ 2011 effort to repeal the legislation would increase deficits by $210 billion from 2010 to 2021.

In April, the agency quietly signaled that it can no longer make that projection; that the law had been changed and delayed so much that there is no longer a credible way to estimate the long-term effects on the deficit of all elements of the program taken together.

In a little noticed footnote to a report updating estimates of the effects of the insurance coverage provisions of the law, the agency headed by Douglas Elmendorf acknowledged that neither CBO nor the Joint Committee on Taxation could determine precisely how scores of provisions other than the insurance coverage would impact long term government spending.

“CBO and JCT can no longer determine exactly how the provisions of the ACA that are not related to the expansion of health insurance coverage have affected their projections of direct spending and revenues,” the CBO wrote. “The provisions that expanded coverage established entirely new programs or components of programs that can be isolated and reassessed. Isolating the incremental effects of those provisions on previously existing programs and revenues four years after enactment of the ACP is not possible.”

The footnote was first reported this week by Roll Call and is just now gaining the attention of health care policy experts who question the basis of CBO’s retreat from its earlier forecasting.

The CBO’s acknowledgment that there is no longer a credible method for gauging the long term budgetary effects of the huge and complex program for extending health coverage to millions of Americans could become fodder for renewed Republican attacks during the mid-term congressional election campaign.

“From purely an analyst’s perspective, I don’t think I would consider this terribly exciting,” Bill Hoagland, a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former Senate Republican budget expert, said in an interview Wednesday. “But politically, I think it’s dynamite.”

Hoagland said critics are almost certain to say, “Wait a minute, you told us it would reduce the deficit back in 2010, why can’t you tell us that today?”

After an incredibly rocky launch of the Affordable Care Act last fall, the program has signed up slightly more than 8 million people through the state and federal exchanges, while millions more enrolled through an expansion of the Medicaid program.

Republicans continue to hammer away at the program, on Capitol Hill and on the campaign trail, although the issue has lost some of its intensity after the administration matched or surpassed its sign-up targets for the first year of operation. And while the law remains largely unpopular among the public—45 percent have negative views of Obamacare—the majority would prefer that lawmakers fix it and then focus on other issues.

Read the full story:  www.thefiscaltimes.com

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Friday, April 4, 2014

How Can Government Battle A 'Suicide Epidemic' Among Veterans? --Stress of fighting "terror"+ unpopularity of war?

April 04, 2014 Congressional Budget Office , Fort Hood 0 Comments
By Jordain Carney, Apr. 3, 2014, Nationaljournal.com
The Fort Hood shooting is an extreme and shocking example of what has become a chronic concern for the military: soldiers with mental-health problems taking their own lives.
And it's not just the active-duty military who face what has become an increasingly daunting problem.
At least 22 veterans commit suicide each day, according to the Veterans Affairs Department. This adds up to more than 2,000 veterans killing themselves so far this year alone, and the military community is facing what advocates refer to as a suicide epidemic.
Read the full story:  www.nationaljournal.com


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Sunday, March 30, 2014

6 Big Unanswered Questions About Obamacare --Just another stop on the road to single-payer, the true goal all along.

March 30, 2014 Congressional Budget Office , HHS 0 Comments
By Peter Suderman, Mar. 28, 2014, reason.com
Obamacare supporters are taking a bit of a victory lap today after yesterday’s administration announcement that six million people have signed up for private plans under the law, equaling the revised projection put out by the Congressional Budget Office after the botched launch of the exchanges last October. 

It’s a weak cause for celebration, given that success, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, was originally "at least" seven million people getting covered under the law by the end of March. And as an Obamacare factoid, the six million sign-ups figure just doesn’t tell us all that much about whether and how the law is working. There are still a lot of major unanswered questions about the law and its future.

 Read the full story:  www.reason.com
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Wednesday, March 26, 2014

"Over 500 Economists Against Federal Minimum Wage Increase" --Yawn. Suppose 500 intel analysts had told W. no WMD?

March 26, 2014 Congressional Budget Office , Minimum Wage 0 Comments
Breanna Deutsch, Mar. 13, 2014, Daily Caller
Over 500 economists signed an open letter to the White House and Congress urging them to reject a federal minimum wage increase.
The list, which included four Nobel laureates and several veterans of past administrations, warned the minimum wage hike would cause economic damage.
“One of the serious consequences of raising the minimum wage is that business owners saddled with a higher cost of labor will need to cut costs, or pass the increase to their consumers in order to make ends meet. Many of the businesses that pay their workers minimum wage operate on extremely tight profit margins, with any increase in the cost of labor threatening this delicate balance,” read the letter.

It also cited the recent report by the Congressional Budget Office, which found that minimum wage increases would lead to lost jobs.
Read the full story:  www.dailycaller.com
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Friday, March 21, 2014

"Obamacare: Abuse of Power Endangers the Nation's Health"

March 21, 2014 Articles by Larry Elder , Congressional Budget Office 0 Comments
By Larry Elder, March 20, 2014

When liberal pro-Obama scholars question the legality of President Barack Obama’s actions to implement Obamacare, the issue of illegal presidential use of power moves from partisan to frightening.

George Washington Law School's Jonathan Turley is the second most-quoted law professor in the nation and a two-time Obama voter. He recently testified before Congress on Obama's extensive use of executive orders and administrative actions to make unilateral changes in Obamacare, immigration policy, minimum wage and in the IRS qualifying standards for non-profit status.

As to Obamacare, Obama, so far, changed it in at least a dozen major ways, including, but not limited to, postponing the employer mandate, allowing insurance carriers to let their insured keep an old policy, and, more recently, redefining the Obamacare "hardship" exemption so broadly as to nullify the individual mandate for at least two more years.

Was this legal?
           
Turley said: “President Obama has repeatedly violated this (separation of powers) doctrine in the circumvention of Congress in areas ranging from health care to immigration law to environmental law. We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis with sweeping implications for our system of government. …” We are now at the constitutional tipping point for our system.”
           
Turley challenged Congress to re-assert its authority. “If balance is to be reestablished,” he said, “it must begin before this President leaves office and that will likely require every possible means to reassert legislative authority. No one in our system can ‘go it alone’ -- not Congress, not the courts, and not the President.”
           
Obama sold Obamacare with many now-broken promises. Saving costs was a big one. In 2009, the Congressional Budget Office set the net cost of Obamacare at $599 billion over 10 years -- citing a gross cost of $848 billion less $249 billion in tax revenues and other cost savings. But recently the CBO revised the 10-year price tag to more than $2 trillion.
           
Economist Jonathan Gruber, the father of Romneycare -- which was the template for Obamacare -- recently admitted that well, no, costs will not be going down. “Covering people with health insurance doesn't save money," said Gruber. “That was sometimes a misleading motivator for the Affordable Care Act. The law isn't designed to save money. It's designed to improve health, and that's going to cost money."
           
So, Obamacare won’t save money, but at least those too poor to afford health insurance will now lead healthier lives, right? Not necessarily.
           
Oregon, years ago expanded its Medicaid program -- the way Obamacare does now -- to include some of Oregon's low-income uninsured. Because of costs, Oregon did this on a random lottery basis. Some got it, some, unfortunately, wanted to but couldn’t. But this allows comparisons. Oregon, for example, can now compare the health outcomes of the now-insured Oregonians--against those who wanted to get insurance, but couldn't. Surely, the now-insured are healthier compared to those without health insurance?
           
But there were no significant differences in their health care outcomes. While the newly insured did increase their doctor visits for preventative and primary-care services, some could not get appointments with doctors, many of whom wouldn't take new Medicaid patients. Emergency room use went up 40 percent among the new Medicaid patients, not down -- all for non-emergency medical needs. “Forbes” health care researcher Avik Roy writes, "The result calls into question the $450 billion a year we spend on Medicaid, and the fact that Obamacare throws 11 million more Americans into this broken program.”
           
Worse, the uninsured dislike Obamacare even more than do those with health insurance. A recent Kaiser Health poll found that among the uninsured, only 22 percent have a favorable attitude towards Obamacare, a far lower percentage than the 56 percent of uninsured who are unfavorable toward Obamacare.
           
Before Obama became president, he said if he were “starting from scratch,” he’d go with a single-payer system. A few months ago, Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid was asked whether Obamacare would lead us to single-payer. Reid said, "Absolutely." This is the real plan.
           
Single-payer is universal healthcare system used in Canada. It remains popular. But in 2009, the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association said: “(Canadian doctors) all agree that the system is imploding. We all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize.” What did the outgoing CMA president propose? He said: "A health-care revolution has passed us by” and “competition should be welcomed, not feared." So while the Canadian Medical Association urges more competition and privatization, America moves towards even more government involvement in health care.
           
In the annual index of countries rated on "economic freedom," the United States -- since 2008 -- has slipped from the number 5 position to 12th. Canada -- at number 6 -- is now more "economically free" than the United States! Economic freedom and prosperity go hand-in-hand.
           
Yet this administration makes it clear it is more interested in wealth re-distribution and less interested in wealth creation. President Obama is quite adept at the former, clueless about how to achieve the latter.


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