I had the chance today to talk about the choices our country faces about federal spending and taxes with two economics classes at Harvard University. Martin Feldstein asked me to give a guest lecture in Ec 1420, American Economic Policy, and Greg Mankiw asked me to do the same in Ec 10, Principles of Economics. My slides can be viewed below.
February 2012
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, which was enacted in response to significant weakness in the economy.
Eleven years may not sound like a long time. But if you’re a website, it’s an eternity. CBO’s site has had a few coats of paint and a couple of replacement parts added over the years, but under the hood it was starting to look like…well, like an 11-year-old website. And so our old site has headed off to a well-deserved retirement.
The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression.
The military services—the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—use modeling techniques to inform parts of their annual budget requests. As directed by the Congress in the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act, today’s CBO study provides information on the models used to develop budgets for activities associated with operational readiness.
Yesterday I spoke to the National Economists Club on our recently released Budget and Economic Outlook. My remarks reiterated much of what I said in several of last week's blog posts:
More than 2 million service members have deployed in support of overseas contingency operations (OCO) in Iraq and Afghanistan since October 2001. Two combat-related conditions that affect some OCO veterans and that have generated widespread concern among policymakers are post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD, an anxiety disorder induced by exposure to a traumatic event, such as witnessing injury or death) and traumatic brain injury (TBI, which is caused by sudden trauma to the head and is commonly sustained by service members exposed to explosions).
The federal government accumulated a budget deficit of $349 billion for the first four months of fiscal year 2012, CBO estimates in its latest Monthly Budget Review, $70 billion less than the shortfall recorded for the same period last year. Without shifts in the timing of certain payments, however, the deficit would have been only $39 billion smaller than the shortfall for the same period last year.
Do you receive a tax deduction for the interest paid on your mortgage or for the taxes you pay to your state and local governments? Would you think about those deductions in the same way if instead of seeing a reduction in taxes for those items the federal government instead simply sent you a check for the same amount?
This morning I testified before the Senate Budget Committee on our annual Budget and Economic Outlook, which was released on Tuesday. As I did in my testimony before the House Budget Committee, I highlighted many of the points that were included in Tuesday’s blog post.