As required by law, CBO prepares regular reports on its estimate of the number of jobs created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), which was enacted in response to significant weakness in the economy at that time.
November 2011
The U.S. Navy’s fleet numbers 284 ships, including 29 amphibious warfare ships that are designed primarily to carry marines and their equipment into combat but also to perform peacetime missions. Today CBO released a report—requested in the report of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011—reviewing the size, missions, and use of the Navy’s amphibious warfare ships and related expeditionary forces under the Navy’s 2012 shipbuilding plan.
This morning I testified before the Senate Budget Committee on policies to promote economic growth and employment in 2012 and 2013.
Last month, the Treasury Department reported that the federal government incurred a budget deficit of $1.3 trillion for fiscal year 2011, almost identical to the deficit it incurred in 2010. As a share of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), the deficit declined slightly—from 9.0 percent in 2010 to 8.7 percent in 2011—but nonetheless it was the third-highest deficit as a share of GDP since 1945.
CBO has a panel of economic advisers consisting of widely recognized experts on a range of issues. Members of the panel have a variety of backgrounds, areas of knowledge, and experience. We host periodic meetings of the advisers at our office and solicit their views between meetings via e-mail exchanges and telephone calls. Through these interactions, we benefit from the advisers’ understanding of cutting-edge research, macroeconomic developments, and economic policy. As a result, the quality of CBO’s analysis of many topics is greatly enhanced.
This morning Jeffrey Kling, CBO’s Associate Director for Economic Analysis, spoke at the Annual Fall Research Conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management. His presentation—which can be viewed below—focused on CBO’s use of evidence in the analysis of budget and economic policies. The presentation addressed numerous questions, including:
During the past decade’s operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military has come to rely heavily on the continuous presence overhead of both manned and unmanned aircraft. Unmanned aircraft are particularly attractive for such missions because they can be designed to remain in the air beyond the physical endurance of human air crews and because they do not put people at risk during operations in potentially hostile airspace.