Today we updated our "Plausible Baseline" to take into account the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)'s latest Budget and Economic Analysis.

Our press release, "Concord Coalition Says CBO Report Shows Need to Re-examine Fiscal Priorities," is here.

Good news comes and goes rather quickly in the 2010 Medicare Trustees’ Report. It begins with the optimistic news that Medicare’s finances have improved substantially as a result of this year’s health care reform bill, the Affordable Care Act (ACA). However, the report then goes on to explain in great detail why this apparently good news is probably not as good as it sounds.

Social Security’s contribution to the overall fiscal gap over the coming decades is smaller than Medicare’s, as the program’s trustees have again made clear in their annual report. If Social Security contributes so much less to the fiscal gap than Medicare, some people ask, why do we have to talk about reforming Social Security? 

If President Obama was looking for Congress to rubber-stamp his request for additional “emergency” funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan this year, he was sorely disappointed. He asked for the money last February but a wary Congress didn’t approve the funding until just last week, and only after considerable debate over the war effort and U.S. spending priorities.

Below are several developments we have been following since the last edition of the Washington Budget Report (sign up here) was published.

New projections released on Friday afternoon by the Obama administration show that the nation’s finances remain in a deep deficit ditch. This was hardly “news,” but it served as a pointed reminder that much hard work needs to be done to get us back on the road to fiscal sustainability.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit last week to the United States underscored the important relationship between the U.S. and Britain, both politically and economically.

Britain’s new coalition government faces tremendous challenges, many of which are similar to the United States’ problems.  Britain’s public debt was 68 percent of GDP at the end of 2009; the comparable figure for the U.S. was 53 percent.

Below are several developments we have been following since the last edition of the Washington Budget Report (sign up here) was published.

Last week President Obama nominated Jacob “Jack” Lew to be the new head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), replacing Peter Orszag, who is stepping down at the end of July. OMB is primarily responsible for developing the President’s budget.

If confirmed by the Senate, as expected, Lew will become OMB director for the second time. He served as President Clinton’s director from 1998 through the end of the Clinton administration in 2001.

The International Monetary Fund has given Americans a tough-minded analysis of the challenges we face in putting the country on a more responsible fiscal course. While a recent IMF report points to some bright spots in the U.S. economy and praises federal policies in some key areas, it offers less upbeat predictions than the Obama administration has issued. More belt-tightening, the international organization warns, will be needed in the next few years and beyond.