Today CBO released a letter updating its analysis of the effects of proposals to limit costs related to medical malpractice (tort reform). Typical legislative proposals for tort reform have included caps on awards for noneconomic and punitive damages, rules allowing the introduction at trials of evidence about insurance payments and related sources of income, statutes of limitations on suits, and replacement of joint-and-several liability with a fair-share rule.
October 2009
CBO estimates, in its latestMonthly Budget Review, that the federal budget deficit was about $1.4 trillion in fiscal year 2009, nearly $1 trillion greater than the shortfall recorded in 2008. Relative to the size of the economy, the 2009 deficit was equal to 9.9 percent of GDP (the highest since 1945), compared with 3.2 percent in 2008. As shown in the table below, both lower revenues and increased spending contributed to the growth in the deficit.
CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) have just issued a preliminary analysis of the Senate Finance Committee Chairmans mark for the Americas Healthy Future Act of 2009, incorporating the amendments that have been adopted to date by the committee. That analysis reflects the specifications posted on the committees Web site on October 2, 2009, corrections posted on October 5, and additional clarifications provided by the staff of the committee through October 6.
In February 2009, President Obama described his strategy for ending the war in Iraq, and announced that all U.S. combat operations there would cease by the end of August 2010 and all troops would be withdrawn by December 2011.
The labor force in the United States is expected to grow much more slowly in the coming decades for several reasons: a long-term decline in fertility rates, the leveling off of a substantial increase in womens labor force participation, and the aging and retirement of baby-boomers. CBO projects that the growth of the labor force, which averaged 1.6 percent per year from 1950 to 2007, will slow to about half a percent per year over the next 20 years. Although slower growth in the workforce might affect the U.S.
Understanding how the annual earnings of workers have changed over time is integral to projecting possible changes in such earnings in the future and considering government tax and spending policies that affect workers. Last week CBO released a paper documenting changes in workers annual earnings during the past three decades.