The latest long term budget projections from the Congressional Budget Office assume that unemployment will be very high for years to come. From the CBO: CBO expects that the recovery will continue but that real (inflation-adjusted) GDP will stay well below the economy’s potential—a level that corresponds to a high rate of use of labor [...]

The Congressional Budget Office is out with a new report about the projected long term solvency of Social Security. The report reaffirms the basic fact that it will be roughly 27 years until the Social Security Trust Fund is exhausted. CBO projects that the trust funds will be exhausted in 2038. In the following year, [...]

The official Congressional Budget Office report on the debt ceiling deal has been release. From the CBO Summary: Establish caps on discretionary spending through 2021; Allow for certain amounts of additional spending for “program integrity” initiatives aimed at reducing the amount of improper benefit payments; Make changes to the Pell Grant and student loan programs; [...]

Paul Ryan’s Republican budget plan would privatize Medicare and dramatically slash Medicaid over time. The result: senior citizens, poor children and the disabled paying dramatically more for care, getting worse health insurance coverage and/or losing coverage altogether, according to a report by the CBO. Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their [...]

It is not unusual for politicians to lie, but, in his efforts to repeal health care reform, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has turned it into a metaphysical art form. In his first press conference as speaker, Boehner was asked to defend his party’s official claim that the new health care law will increase the deficit [...]

I hope everyone looking at the CBO’s long-term budget projections (PDF) understands how completely arbitrary they are. Take, for example, this passage showing how the CBO calculated the long-term cost of Medicare. The CBO claims the cost of private health insurance will eventually grow at the same rate as GDP, yet the cost of Medicare [...]

The Congressional Budget Office just revised upwards the projected cost (PDF) of the new health care law by $115 billion. The increase is due mainly to the fact that the original CBO score of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act did not factor in the cost of actually having the government implement the reform [...]