May 22, 2013

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What is "Plausible" for the Fiscal Outlook?
Sunday, August 30, 2009 - 8:53 PM

The first definition of “plausible” on dictionary.com is:

plausible
[plaw-zuh-buhl]

having an appearance of truth or reason; seemingly worthy of approval or acceptance; credible; believable: a plausible excuse; a plausible plot.

Note that it doesn’t say “likely” or “probable”–it connotes the notion of possibility not probability. I bring this up because many folks, especially the media, want to interpret the “Concord Coalition Plausible Baseline” as our best forecast of what the fiscal outlook will turn out to be. No, we’re not saying that’s the most likely outcome; we’re saying that’s a plausible, possible outcome. And it’s a worst-case scenario, because that’s what we do at Concord: we warn about the possible really bad outcomes if we don’t start making more responsible choices–because we don’t want them to happen.

On Saturday's front page of the Washington Post...

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New Budget Numbers
Tuesday, August 25, 2009 - 12:14 PM

Throughout the day, Concord will be releasing new items related to today's budget numbers released by the CBO and OMB.

For immediate reactions, check out our Twitter feed.

Our new Concord Plausible Baseline Chart with its backup data can be found on our baseline page.

A press release is in the works (it is up now--JG), but for now a few interesting statistics:

  • Our baseline, which is based on the CBO baseline and extends current policy, shows a $14.4 trillion in additional deficits over the next 10 years.
  • By 2019, debt held by the public will pass 100% of GDP (102%)
  • In 2019, interest on the debt will cost over $1 trillion. At 5% of GDP, that will be more than spending on National defense or domestic discretionary programs.

More soon...

...in the...

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Borrowing Good News on the Deficit?
Friday, August 21, 2009 - 4:10 PM

Bloomberg and AP reported this week that the Obama Administration’s latest budget outlook, scheduled for release next Tuesday (same day as CBO’s summer update–watching the PR and press that day will be interesting), will show that they expect the fiscal year 2009 budget deficit to come in $262 billion lower than they predicted in May–at “only” $1.58 trillion, or 11.2 percent of GDP. Cause for celebration? Well, only if you don’t mind “premature celebration.”

Both articles point out that a $1.6 trillion deficit is not really qualitatively different from a $1.8 trillion deficit (both are “humongous”). From the Bloomberg article (by Brian Faler and Roger Runningen):

The deficit figure, as revised, would amount to 11.2 percent of the nation’s economy, the official said. That would be the biggest share since 1945.

“It’s better than we expected but it’s still a huge deficit,” said Stan Collender, a...

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Increasing The Debt Limit
Friday, August 14, 2009 - 10:41 AM

Last Friday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sent a letter to Congress requesting an increase in the statutory debt limit.  In the letter, Geithner noted:

"It is critically important that Congress act before the limit is reached so that citizens and investors here and around the world can remain confident that the United States will always meet its obligations."

The current statutory debt limit is $12.104 trillion.  As it stands today, the national debt is $11.658 trillion -- providing less than $500 billion of buffer room.  The Treasury Department expects federal debt to exceed the limit sometime this fall. 

To help everyone understand the statutory debt limit, the drivers behind this proposed increase, and the options available to policymakers, The Concord Coalition published an "Understanding the Federal Debt Limit" issue brief. The brief sets out to make sense of these developments and encourage Congress to address the real issues at hand. 

 

P.S. On a...

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CBO: The Health Reform Slopes Don’t Add Up
Thursday, July 30, 2009 - 11:18 AM

The Congressional Budget Office once again validates some intuition many of us had about health care reform: when you have health costs rising much faster than the economy is growing, a package that expands coverage but is unwilling to tax health benefits to pay for it is not likely to add up to a deficit-neutral plan over the longer term. The basic problem is that the cost of coverage expansion will continue to increase at the same rate as health care costs, but the tax increase offsets will only grow (at best) at the rate of economic growth. Then you have an additional problem that many of the offsets might be one-time cuts or cuts whose value does not even keep up with economic growth or inflation. 

Quoting from pages 12-13 of the report (a letter to Congressman Dave Camp (R-MI) on the House tri-committee proposal), emphasis added:

Looking ahead to the decade beyond 2019, CBO tries to evaluate the rate at which the budgetary impact of...

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The President's Words
Thursday, July 23, 2009 - 9:19 PM

While the President's press conference Wednesday night got a lot of attention and focused substantially on health care, he also did an interview with Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt earlier in the day. The wide-ranging interview touched on health care reform, but also on a lot of the other subjects Concord Coalition members are interested in -- like deficits, debt, Social Security reform and a BRAC-like fiscal commission. It is worth a read.

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The Can’t-We-Do-Better Blue Dogs
Wednesday, July 22, 2009 - 5:59 PM

In today’s Washington Post, Harold Meyerson complains that the centrist “Blue Dog” Democrats have a “can’t do” attitude when it comes to health care reform:

[O]ur government used to actually pave roads, build bridges and allow for secure retirements by levying taxes on those who could afford to pay them. To today’s centrist Democrats, this has become a distant memory, a history lesson they cannot grasp. The notion that actual individuals might have to pay to secure the national interest appalls them. In the House, the Blue Dogs doggedly oppose proposals to fund universal coverage by taxing the wealthiest 1 percent of the nation’s households…

Centrist Democrats’ opposition to health reform verges on the incoherent. A caucus (the Blue Dogs) formed ostensibly to promote balanced budgets now disapproves of the proposed taxes that would cover the expenses of the new programs. The congressional centrists say, commendably, that they want to squeeze more economies out of the system, but they oppose giving more power to an agency that would set the payment...

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Aging, Costs, and Interaction
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 - 12:15 PM

It has almost become axiomatic that growing health care costs, rather than population aging, is the overwhelming cause of a projected spike in federal spending. That notion was dispelled in CBO’s Long-Term Budget Outlook published last week. As explained in the report:

“Federal spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will grow relative to the economy both because health care spending per beneficiary is projected to increase and because the population is aging. Spending on Medicare and Medicaid will be driven by both factors, while Social Security spending will rise because of the population’s aging. Between now and 2035, aging is projected to make the larger contribution to the growth of spending for those three programs as a share of GDP. After 2035, continued increases in health care spending per beneficiary are projected to dominate the growth in spending for the three programs.”

 

Later in the report, CBO quantifies the relative effects of aging and health care growth on projected...

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PAYGO is Simple: Just Pay for What You Want!
Thursday, June 25, 2009 - 9:30 AM

After reading this post, hopefully all of our loyal readers will finally understand the simplicity and beauty of the Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) concept. 

First, I should mention that today we published an issue brief on the new statutory PAYGO law proposed by President Obama and introduced in the House of Representatives to coincide with today's PAYGO hearing in the House Budget Committee, featuring OMB Director Orszag. This proposal puts in place a law that requires any new spending or tax cut legislation to be offset so that it does not increase the deficit. If it did, the law forces automatic spending cuts designed to balance out the difference.

The Concord Coalition supports enactment of statutory PAYGO. The basic message in our brief is that PAYGO can be, and has been in the past, an important budget enforcement tool that helps promote fiscal responsibility. However, PAYGO shouldn't be thought of as more than that, and certainly not as a silver bullet that can somehow solve the nation's long-term fiscal...

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Statutory PAYGO Important But Not Cure All
Tuesday, June 9, 2009 - 7:31 PM

Today, President Obama held a press conference with Congressional leaders to announce his support for enactment of a statutory pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) budgeting rule.

The Obama administration’s proposal looks to build off the PAYGO rules put in place during the 1990s. Similar to them in design, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would keep a running scorecard for the costs associated with enacted legislation for each year through 2014 and compare those costs to the established baseline. If the scorecard found the cumulative effect of enacted legislation to increase the deficit, OMB would be required to reduce spending in certain non-exempt mandatory programs to balance the difference -- a process called sequestration. Although sequestration under PAYGO was never actually ordered in the 1990's, the existence of this automatic trigger provides some incentive for members of Congress to be fiscally disciplined.

While PAYGO has recently been in place for a few years, it has only existed as a congressional rule which has often been waived or ignored for legislation requiring politically difficult trade-offs. The proposal that President Obama put forward, and that the...

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