Director Doug Elmendorf summarizes comments about immigration policy that he made last week at the American Enterprise Institute’s World Forum.
CBO Blog
The federal government ran a budget deficit of $379 billion for the first five months of fiscal year 2014, CBO estimates, $115 billion less than the shortfall recorded in the same span last year.
Last week, Director Doug Elmendorf participated in two panels at the American Enterprise Institute’s World Forum. Today’s post reviews his talk about health care policy; tomorrow’s post will summarize his comments about immigration policy.
Do public-private partnerships build roads more quickly or at a lower cost? Does private financing increase the funding available for highway projects? Joseph Kile, Assistant Director for Microeconomic Studies, testified on those issues.
Director Doug Elmendorf testified before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch.
CBO’s updated estimates of the effects of the Affordable Care Act’s insurance coverage provisions, which were published in the agency’s recent report on the budget and economic outlook, do not differ much from those released in May 2013.
CBO examines the change in its projections of potential output for the year 2017: The estimate for that year that CBO prepared in February 2014 is about 7 percent lower than what it projected in January 2007.
Director Doug Elmendorf spoke yesterday about the main factors that are causing federal health care spending to grow much faster than the economy. He also summarized CBO’s analysis of a wide range of approaches to address that growth.
The slow recovery of the labor market largely reflects slow growth in the demand for goods and services. Output will grow more rapidly in the next few years than it has recently but recovery in the labor market will take some time.
CBO projects that the economy will grow more rapidly from 2014 to 2017—at an average rate of about 3 percent a year—than it did in 2013. But the unemployment rate will decline only gradually, finally dropping below 6.0 percent in 2017.