Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), also known as the economic stimulus package, certain recipients of funds appropriated in ARRA (most grant and loan recipients, contractors, and subcontractors) are required to report the number of jobs funded through ARRA after the end of each calendar quarter. The law also requires CBO to comment on those reported numbers. A CBO report released this afternoon satisfies that requirement and under the law is required to be submitted no later than today.
August 2010
In March, CBO estimated that the total cost of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) would be $109 billion over the life of the program. That estimate (which represented the present value, adjusted for market risk, of the program’s activities) was based on market values in February, actions that had occurred up to that time, and an assumption that additional amounts would be allocated to programs that were not yet specified. In the baseline budget projections that CBO released yesterday, the lifetime cost of the program has been reduced to $66 billion. Three factors account for the re
CBO estimates, in its annual summer update of the budget and economic outlook, that the federal budget deficit for 2010 will exceed $1.3 trillion—$71 billion below last year’s total and $27 billion lower than the amount that CBO projected in March 2010 when it issued its previous estimate. Relative to the size of the economy, this year’s deficit is expected to be the second largest shortfall in the past 65 years: At 9.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), it is exceeded only by last year’s deficit of 9.9 percent of GDP.
The federal budget deficit was about $1.2 trillion in the first ten months of fiscal year 2010, CBO estimates in its latest Monthly Budget Review—about $90 billion less than the roughly $1.3 trillion deficit incurred through July 2009.
In responding to questions raised by Congressional staff and outside analysts, we have found some errors in one section of our report The Long-Term Budget Outlook, which was released on June 30, 2010 and discussed in a previous blog entry. To correct those errors, we issued a revised version of the report today along with a letter explaining the changes.