CBO issued a letter today responding to a request from the Chairman of the House Budget Committee. In December 2007, we issued a report on the nation's 75-year fiscal gap (roughly speaking, the gap between the present value of projected spending and projected revenue, as a share of GDP).
CBO Blog
Many Hill staffers, policy analysts, reporters, and others are interested in some of the details behind our most recent budget projections. We have posted a variety of such additional detail.
As I have noted earlier, I will occasionally use this blog to clarify misinterpretations of our work. On that note, some recent blog postings seem to warrant a clarification of the main points in CBO
CBO, with contributions from the Joint Committee on Taxation, released an analysis of the Presidents budget submission for fiscal year 2009 this morning. (I will be summarizing our analysis at a conference held by the National Association for Business Economists today.) A report that presents the full analysis of the President's budget, including CBOs assessment of its macroeconomic effects, will be published on March 19.
I'm speaking today at a conference held by the Tax Policy Center and the American Tax Policy Institute on "Taxes and Health Insurance: Analysis and Policy." The slides for my talk and the audio from the sessionare posted here. They summarize CBO's analysis (based in part on revenue estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation) of the Administration's 2007 proposal to alter the tax incentives associated with health insurance.
I spoke this past weekend about long-term care -- a topic of particular concern to many governors given the role of Medicaid in its financing -- at the National Governors Association Winter Meeting. My slides from the NGA talk are posted here, and the webcast from the session is here. CBO has done important work on long-term care; see for example the study authored by Stuart Hagen of our Health and Human Resources Division in 2004.
CBO released a report today on the deductibility of state and local taxes on federal income tax returns, which provides an indirect federal subsidy to the state and local governments that levy deductible taxes. The state and local tax deduction reduced federal revenues by an estimated $50 billion in fiscal year 2007.
CBO released a new study today on regional variation in health care costs. As previous CBO documents have emphasized (and I walk around with a chart about it!), health care spending varies substantially across the nation.
CBO released a new macroeconomic forecast today, in advance of a new set of budget baseline projections we will release in conjunction with our analysis of the President's budget. (We have occasionally issued these types of revisions before but they are relatively uncommon.) The revision is motivated by three recent developments: new data about the weakness of the economy, actions by the Federal Reserve, and the stimulus package passed by the Congress and signed into law by the President.
CBO released a new report today on policy options for reducing carbon emissions.
Global climate change represents one of the nation's most serious long-term problems. Rising concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are gradually warming the Earths climate, and some risk exists that the buildup of those gases could trigger abrupt changes and extreme damage. Substantially reducing emissions of those gases, however, could impose significant costs on the U.S. and global economies.