CBO plans to release its 2012 Long-Term Budget Outlook on Tuesday, June 5. The report will be available on CBO's website at 10 a.m. EDT. The 2011 report is available here.
These annual projections incorporate long-term demographic trends and the long-term impact of rising health care costs.
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.
Policymakers face difficult trade-offs in deciding how quickly to implement policies to reduce budget deficits.
Energy use—for electricity, transportation, and heating and air conditioning—is pervasive throughout the U.S. economy, representing 8.4 percent of U.S. gross domestic product in 2010. About 80 percent of the energy used by households and businesses comes from oil, natural gas, and coal; the rest comes from nuclear power and renewable sources, such as wind and the sun. Disruptions in the supply of commodities used to produce energy tend to raise energy prices, imposing an increased burden on households and businesses.
The federal government incurred a budget deficit of $721 billion in the first seven months of fiscal year 2012, CBO estimates in its latest Monthly Budget Review—$149 billion less than the shortfall reported during the same period last year. Without shifts in the timing of certain payments, however, the deficit so far this year would have been only $92 billion smaller.
On Wednesday I visited the University of Chicago, where I made a presentation on "The Challenge of Stabilizing Federal Debt" and spoke with a number of professors. My hosts included several members of CBO's Panel of Economic Advisers, and I was pleased to be able to spend time with them and with other members of the Chicago faculty.
Federal highway and mass transit programs are financed largely by a variety of transportation-related excise taxes. The largest share of the revenues comes from the federal tax on gasoline, including gasoline that is blended with ethanol. Revenues from those taxes are credited to the Highway Trust Fund, and most of the spending for those programs is attributable to that fund. Because the gasoline tax is set as a fixed amount per gallon (currently 18.4 cents), policies that are designed to reduce gasoline consumption would decrease the amounts credited to the fund.
