This workbook allows users to define and analyze alternative economic scenarios by specifying differences in the values of four economic variables relative to the values underlying CBO’s January 2025 projections.
Summary
This workbook allows users to define and analyze alternative economic scenarios by specifying differences in the values of four economic variables—productivity growth, labor force growth, interest rates, and inflation—relative to the values underlying the Congressional Budget Office’s most recent projections. Those projections were published in The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2025 to 2035.
CBO has long published “rules of thumb” that provide an idea of how changes in key economic variables would affect its projections. The rules of thumb are described in How Changes in Economic Conditions Might Affect the Federal Budget: 2025 to 2035. This workbook applies the agency’s current rules of thumb to scenarios defined by the user and provides estimates of how revenues, outlays, and deficits under those scenarios might differ from those in the agency’s January 2025 baseline budget projections. The workbook also shows how certain variables—including gross domestic product (GDP), real GDP (that is, GDP adjusted to remove the effects of changes in prices), and interest rates—might change as a result.
The formulas underlying this workbook were created specifically for these interactive tables and are meant only to provide results that approximate those CBO would produce using its broad set of economic and budget models.