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After years of trillion-dollar annual deficits, federal red ink is lessening – and pace of the decline now looks much quicker than forecasters thought it would be. That’s good news for American taxpayers worried about a pileup of debt – and the risk that would pose for their pocketbooks in the future. The debt problem isn’t solved, but this is progress. Here are the new numbers: The federal budget deficit will shrink this year to $642 billion, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office now estimates. Just three months ago, the CBO was forecasting a deficit of $845 billion for the 2013...

When President Obama was selling his health care legislation to Congress, he declared that “the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years.” But with the law’s major provisions set to kick in next year, a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office projects that the law will cost double that, or $1.8 trillion. What accounts for the dramatic difference? It’s true that at the time of passage, the CBO said the gross cost of the law’s provisions to expand insurance coverage would be $940 billion over a decade. But as many critics of the health care...

An exhaustive study by three congressional committees delivers startling news about the dire effects of Obamacare: President Barack Obama’s signature legislation could increase health insurance premiums by over 200 percent and render insurance coverage unaffordable for millions of Americans. Broadly, the new report declares that Obamacare “breaks its core promise” to make healthcare coverage affordable. The report, “The Price of Obamacare’s Broken Promises,” was prepared by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Majority Staff; Senate Committee on Finance, Minority Staff; and Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Minority Staff. “Studies and analyses from the Congressional Budget Office,...

There are three major factors that stand in the way of entitlement reform and the other responsible budgetary measures that must be taken to avert an eventual national financial catastrophe, and they have a common source. The first is that too many American people remain, amazingly, in the fog about the scope of the problem. The second is that a certain political ideology refuses to substitute a designated driver for the intoxicated entitlement state, which is driving the American bankruptcy bus. The third is that the leader of this noxious ideology has a further conflict of interest precluding a solution...

Senate Democrats are finally beginning the process of writing a budget after four years of dereliction. They will almost certainly include some changes to Medicare, the largest driver of federal spending and debt. But unfortunately, there are indications that they intend to focus on the small piece of Medicare (10.6 percent in 2012) that is actually working well: the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. The drug companies cut a deal with the White House early in Obama’s first term to provide the funding for pro-Obamacare TV commercials and street organizing in exchange for favorable treatment in that bill. But...

 Every politician in America knows that Social Security (SS) is a third rail. Any Pol who tries to mess with the country’s largest and most popular entitlement program is going to have the likes of the AARP coming after them. It’s not possible to win an election on a platform that advocates cutting back SS.With that in mind, I find it interesting to report that a very credible source is now predicting that Obama AND Congress will take action over the next 24 months that will substantially undermine both the long and short-term health of SS. The legislative raid...

People on both sides of tax issues often speak of such things as a “$300 billion tax increase” or a “$500 billion tax decrease.” That is fine if they are looking back at something that has already happened. But it can be sheer nonsense if they are talking about a proposed increase or decrease in the tax rate. The government can only raise or lower the tax rate. Whether the actual tax revenues that the government will collect as a result will go up or down is a matter of prophecy. And these prophecies have been wrong far too often...

The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday quietly raised the 10-year cost of ObamaCare's insurance subsidies offered via the health law's exchanges by $233 billion, according to a Congressional Budget Office review of its latest spending forecast. The CBO's new baseline estimate shows that ObamaCare subsidies offered through the insurance exchanges — which are supposed to be up and running by next January — will total more than $1 trillion through 2022, up from $814 billion over those same years in its budget forecast made a year ago. That's an increase of nearly 29%. [snip] The CBO also expects 7 million...

CBOThe CBO has just published its Budget and Economic Outlook.The big headline: the CBO expects the U.S. budget deficit to fall to $845 billion this year.  This would be the first reading under $1 trillion in five years.They also estimate that the deficit falls to $616 billion in 2014 and as low as $430 billion in 2015.They assume unemployment rates of 8.0 percent in 2013 and 7.6 percent in 2014.  They also assume GDP growth of 1.4 percent in 2013 accelerating to 3.4 percent in 2014.Here are the CBO's long-term budget projections: CBO And here are the economic projections:...

People on both sides of tax issues often speak of such things as a "$300 billion tax increase" or a "$500 billion tax decrease." That is fine if they are looking back at something that has already happened. But it can be sheer nonsense if they are talking about a proposed increase or decrease in the tax rate. The government can only raise or lower the tax rate. Whether the actual tax revenues that the government will collect as a result will go up or down is a matter of prophecy. And these prophecies have been far too wrong far...

Two weeks ago, when we commented on the biggest farce in financial thinking at the time (promptly replaced by the even more lunatic platinum coin "idea"), namely that one of the main "spending cut" proposals of the Obama administration, amounting to $290 billion, was the assertion that the US will save hundreds of billions because, get this, interest rates are now lower than they were before. We commented as follows:

The fiscal-cliff negotiations have deteriorated into an embarrassing travesty of competing press conferences, off-the-record remarks, closed meetings, and sound bites. The Republican side is frustrated and flabbergasted by the absence of a concrete proposal from the President that can be scored by the Congressional Budget Office and then “marked up” by Congress according to standard procedures. Vague offers of so and so many trillions of revenue increases and spending cuts spread over a decade are just words, not real proposals. The last serious fiscal-cliff projections date back to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) August 2012 assessment of the budgetary effects...

The days are ticking off to a January 1 fiscal implosion, and Republicans are trying to MacGyver a fiscal fix. Three days after the election, President Obama claimed the voters had given him a mandate to raise taxes on the rich. With Pew reporting that 58 percent of Americans feel the rich pay too little in taxes, it’s hard for Republicans to contradict the president. Unless Congress intervenes to prevent the Bush tax cuts from expiring, high earners will face significantly higher income taxes in 2013. For the top two brackets, the rate will rise to 36 percent (from 33...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A new government report says the so-called fiscal cliff would send the economy back into recession and cause a spike in the jobless rate to 9.1 percent by next fall. The Congressional Budget Office analysis says the combination of automatic tax increases and spending cuts would cut the deficit by $503 billion through next September. But that would cause the economy to shrink by 0.5 percent next year. The report comes as a newly re-elected President Barack Obama and Congress are seeking ways to avert the problems. The study estimates that America's gross domestic product would grow...

CBO reports deficit was $1.1 trillion in 2012By Erik Wasson - 10/05/12 01:07 PM ET The government's fiscal 2012 has now come to a close and the score is in. The budget deficit for 2012 was $1.1 trillion, the fourth year of trillion-dollar deficits under President Obama. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Friday that the $1.1 trillion shortfall, based on Treasury statements, was about $200 billion less than in fiscal 2011. But part of this difference is due to a timing shift that put some final payments in 2011 because Oct. 1, 2011 fell on a weekend. Without the...

The Congressional Budget Office released a report that gave a grim outlook for the U.S. economy. The CBO predicts a 0.5% decline in real GDP between the fourth quarter of 2012 and 2013 if the Bush Tax Cuts are allowed to expire and scheduled spending cuts are made. The CBO also predicts unemployment to rise to 9% for the second half of 2013 under the same scenario. Although these circumstances could prove hazardous for the U.S. economy in 2013, the outlook for the deficit, according to the CBO, would improve significantly. If tax increases are made, the deficit would be...

Within minutes of the announcement that Paul Ryan would be Mitt Romney's running mate, the Democratic attack machine shifted into high gear. "Paul Ryan will destroy Medicare as we know it," claimed the ads. "So will Mitt Romney." Be afraid. Be very afraid. But isn't ObamaCare what seniors should really be scared of? Yes, indeed. And to hide that fact, the Obama forces are telling five big lies. Lie Number One: Health Reform Is Good For Seniors. Millions of taxpayer dollars (that's our dollars) have been spent on Andy Griffith television ads and other advertisements trying to convince seniors that...

It has been confirmed in a new report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office that the benefits of opening up and leasing protected federal landsforthe development of oil and natural gas are next to nothing. The estimated profit would be as little as $500 million a year which is only 0.7% of the total gross take of revenue of $150 billion that is expected to be generated over the next decade from leases already in place. A favorite cheer of the Republican party has been "drill baby drill." Some would now say that talking point has been proven impotent. The...

I do realize that this was posted several days ago. I'm not sure if it was posted at a good time since there were only 2 replies. If you haven't seen this video, watch it! As Paul Ryan talked more and more, Obama got angrier and angrier. It was quite painful, but soooo amusing! I kept waiting for his middle finger to come up holding his face up. I wish we the video went longer to hear what Obama wanted to say at the end. Great video on a highly intelligent Paul Ryan.

On Feb. 2, 2009, President Barack Obama explained his chance to fix the economy to host Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today": "I will be held accountable. I've got four years. ... If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition." Here are the top 10 reasons I believe President Obama shouldn't sit a single day beyond his one term in the Oval Office: 10) Obama's economic actions have failed to lower the unemployment rate in the U.S. to less than 8 percent for the past 42 months, which is a record. Nearly...

ARE AMERICANS EAGER for higher taxes on the affluent? Barack Obama and his allies clearly think so. The president who came to office vowing to "spread the wealth around" by raising taxes on individuals with incomes above $200,000 is doubling down, making a tax hike on the rich the centerpiece of his campaign for reelection. "We should ask the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more," he urged a White House audience last week. "We're talking about folks like me going back to the tax rates that existed under Bill Clinton.… And here's the thing -- there are a lot...

A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report says that under the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, 30 million non-elderly Americans will remain without health insurance in 2022. One of the main arguments the Obama administration made for passing the Affordable Care Act was that it would provide coverage for the uninsured.

It was either Adolf Hitler or his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who said that the people will believe any lie, if it is big enough and told often enough, loud enough. Although the Nazis were defeated in World War II, this part of their philosophy survives triumphantly to this day among politicians, and nowhere more so than during election years. Perhaps the biggest lie of this election year, and the one likely to be repeated the most often, is that the income of "the rich" is going up, while other people's incomes are going down. If you listen to Barack...

WASHINGTON -- Americans paid the lowest tax rates in 30 years to the federal government in 2009, partly because of tax cuts President Barack Obama sought to combat the Great Recession, congressional budget analysts said Tuesday. A sharp decline in income -- especially among the wealthiest Americans, who pay the highest tax rates -- also played a role, according to the report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Household income fell 12 percent on average from 2007 to 2009, with income among the top 1 percent of earners decreasing by more than a third. Still, at the very moment anti-tax...

Wealthy Americans earn about 50 percent of all income but pay nearly 70 percent of the federal tax burden, according to the latest analysis Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office — though the agency said the very richest have seen their share of taxes fall the past few years. CBO looked at 2007 through 2009 — the latest years data are available, but enough to include the early effects of the last recession — and found the bottom 20 percent of American earners paid just three-tenths of a percent of the total federal tax burden, while the richest 20 percent...

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the U.S. will report nearly a trillion dollar deficit for the first nine months of fiscal year 2012. In its “monthly budget review,” the CBO reports that the Treasury Department has accrued a $905 billion deficit throughout the first three quarters of the fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1, 2011. The deficit was $66 billion less than the $971 billion deficit incurred over the same period of fiscal 2011. The deficit was lower because spending was about one percent higher than 2011, while revenues were five percent higher than at this point last year....

Le sigh. Yet another study pointing to imminent fiscal calamity, while Obama & friends busy themselves trying to convince everyone that the Obama administration hasn't actually increased spending all that much, or something. Instead of ... oh, I don't know ... maybe actually doing something about it. The new CBO report warns that increased entitlement spending driven by the retirement of the baby boomers and insufficient revenue is making the long-term outlook for the national debt increasingly dire.Under CBOÂ’s most likely scenario, in which lawmakers extend current tax rates and fail to curb entitlement spending, debt held by the public...

The Congressional Budget Office in a new report: When [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] was being considered, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that it would increase budget deficits by $787 billion between fiscal years 2009 and 2019. CBO now estimates that the total impact over the 2009–2019 period will amount to about $831 billion. By CBO’s estimate, close to half of that impact occurred in fiscal year 2010, and more than 90 percent of ARRA’s budgetary impact

Tax hikes and spending cuts set to take effect in January would suck $607 billion out of the economy next year, plunging the nation at least briefly back into recession, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday. Unless lawmakers act, the economy is likely to contract in the first half of 2013 at an annualized rate of 1.3 percent, the CBO said, before returning to 2.3 percent growth later in the year. Canceling those tax and spending policies would protect the recovery in the short run and encourage more vibrant growth, around 4.4 percent, in 2013, the CBO said. However,...

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Friday that President Obama’s 2013 budget will hurt the economy in the long term, arguing the larger deficits it would produce would reduce the amount of capital available to businesses. After five years, the CBO says, the Obama proposals would reduce economic output by between 0.5 percent and 2.2 percent. Larger deficits caused by the budget would cause the government to issue more bonds, sucking up private capital to finance its debts and thereby reducing the funds businesses could use to expand and hire, the CBO said. An increased tax on capital gains included...

A new estimate from congressional economists says the government will run a $1.2 trillion deficit for the budget year ending just a few weeks before Election Day. It would be the fourth straight year of trillion dollar-plus deficits. The almost $100 billion spike from earlier projections for the fiscal 2012 deficit comes almost exclusively because Congress passed legislation recommended by President Barack Obama to renew a 2 percentage point cut in payroll taxes and jobless benefits for people languishing on unemployment rolls for more than six months.

A new report from the Congressional Budget Office hands critics of the health reform law a great new talking point: Under a worst-case scenario, the law could lead to 20 million people losing their employer-sponsored insurance in 2019. The agency doesn’t think that’s likely, however. The new report, released Thursday, said the agency expects 3 million to 5 million fewer people to have employer coverage each year because of the health reform law. That’s close to the agency’s original estimate, which predicted 3 million people could lose their workplace coverage. But the new report also lays out the worst-case scenarios...

VIDEO AT LINK Conservative economist Thomas Sowell is calling for the abolishment of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) after it revealed this week that Obamacare may cost American taxpayers nearly twice the $940 billion it originally estimated -- $1.7 trillion over the next decade. “I think occasionally the CBO does something that’s useful,” Sowell told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview. “But by and large, I think it should be abolished.” In September 2009, President Obama estimated healthcare reform under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would cost an additional $900 billion over 10 years. The CBO initially projected the...

President Obama's proposed budget would add $6.4 trillion to the nation's deficits over the next decade, according to a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.By 2022, this would bring debt held by the public to $18.8 trillion, or 76.3 percent of the gross domestic product, according to the analysis.Compared with the CBO baseline, Obama's budget would add $3.5 trillion to deficits from 2013 through 2022, both because he would extend many of the Bush tax cuts and increase spending. Overall, spending would be about $1.1 trillion higher than the CBO baseline and revenues would be $2.4 trillion more.On...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The Congressional Budget Office says that Obamacare is gonna cost twice what he told us. The magic number for Obamacare was a trillion dollars. They had to keep that number under a trillion dollars in order to get it passed. I'm not gonna revisit why and I'm not gonna go back through all the details and the minutia and the arm twisting and the games they were playing to get Obamacare passed because they eventually got it passed. They tried toying around with the idea "deeming" it to have been passed, not even voting on it, a...

A new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office states that by 2016, Obamacare will result in 4 million people fewer people getting health insurance coverage from their employers.The estimate is a vast increase from the CBO prediction just a year ago that 1 million would no longer obtain coverage from their employers. And it raises substantial questions about the veracity of one of Obama’s key pledges in selling the health care law – that everyone who wants to keep their current health insurance plan and doctor could do it.It’s not clear how many of the 4 million would be...

Via Philip Klein. The original 10-year price tag, the one that made it "safe" (but not really safe) for Democrats to drop this fiscal atomic bomb, was $940 billion. What happened, you ask? Well, see for yourself:Remember, they gamed this thing so that it wouldn’t take effect until 2014, which means that the cost of the first four years of implementation was essentially zero. That $940 billion figure really represented just six years of cost, not 10, but it was politically invaluable to Democratic messaging in letting them tout the bill as costing less than a trillion dollars. Now that...

Today we, er, celebrate the third anniversary of the 2009 stimulus package’s presidential signature. When Barack Obama applied his signature, he promised that the $800 billion authorized to his administration by a Democratic Congress would allow him to keep unemployment under 8% and revamp the American economy for long-term prosperity and solid economic growth. Yesterday, in an early anniversary present, the CBO scored the performance of the stimulus and the Obama administration on that very metric, and the first paragraph delivers the verdict clearly, emphases mine: The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February...

The Congressional Budget Office released a report Thursday that showed real unemployment in America at 15 percent for the month of January, a figure considerably higher than the White House’s oft-cited 8.3 percent figure that does not include part-time workers seeking full-time work or those who have given up hope of finding a job altogether. From the CBO: Many people would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks, or are working part-time but would prefer full-time work. If those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would...

The Congressional Budget Office released its annual Budget and Economic Outlook this week. Last year’s was a tragedy, but the new one is a horror story. The crushing burden of government debt and persistent unemployment – which, contrary to the carefully massaged statistics released for public consumption, has really been in double digits for years, when the collapsing work force is taken into account – will conspire with skyrocketing taxes after the expiration of the Bush tax rates, and leave us with only 1.1 percent projected GDP growth next year. That will leave us with one of the slowest economies...

For years, the Left led by President Obama and aided by the robots in the media have continued to say there is a growing income gap in America. They say the rich are getting richer and the poor are being left behind. President Obama recently stated in his weekend address to the nation, “Over the past three decades, the middle class has lost ground while the wealthiest few have become even wealthier.” The recent flurry of news stories came as a result of a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that concluded: “From 1979 to 2007, real (inflation-adjusted) average household...

Buried within the Congressional Budget Office's most recent report on the progress of President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a surprising admission: the CBO now estimates the stimulus might have been only half as effective as previously thought. You wouldn't know it from the headlines. "Stimulus added up to 3.3M jobs," reads a representative piece from Politico reporting on the November CBO report. This headline is accurate for the high-end estimate. That estimate, however, is essentially unchanged from previous reports. In the past, the CBO's low estimate for jobs "created or saved" was 1.2 million which, in this...

In short, what the Congressional Budget Office presents as increased inequality from 2003 to 2007 was actually evidence that the top 1% of earners report more taxable income when tax rates are reduced on dividends, capital gains and businesses filing under the individual tax code. If Congress raises top individual tax rates much above the corporate rate, many billions in business income would rapidly vanish from the individual tax returns the CBO uses to measure the income of the top 1%. Small businesses and professionals would revert to reporting most income on corporate tax returns as they did in 1979.

Recovery: After nearly all the stimulus money has been spent, the Congressional Budget Office now admits it cost more than advertised, did less to boost growth and will hurt the economy in the long run. In its latest quarterly report on the economic effects of the Obama stimulus, the CBO sharply lowered its "worst case" scenario while trimming many of its upper-bound estimates for stimulus-fueled growth and employment. The new report finds, for example, that the stimulus may have added as little as 0.7% to GDP growth in 2010 — when spending was at its peak — and created as...

In a blow to the Obama administration, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has concluded that the president’s economic stimulus plan created fewer jobs than expected and “crowds out” private investment. A new report the CBO released on Tuesday finds that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act may have boosted the economy in the short run by sustaining some 700,000 jobs at its peak in 2010 but “will reduce output slightly in the long run — by between 0 and 0.2 percent after 2016.” The report estimates that the total number of jobs the plan produced was far fewer than the...

The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday downgraded its estimate of the benefits of President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, saying it may have sustained as few as 700,000 jobs at its peak last year and that over the long run it will actually be a net drag on the economy. CBO said that while the Recovery Act boosted the economy in the short run, the extra debt that the stimulus piled up “crowds out” private investment and “will reduce output slightly in the long run — by between 0 and 0.2 percent after 2016.” The analysis confirms what CBO predicted before...

NRO's Andrew Stiles flags this exchange from Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf's testimony before the Senate Budget Committee ealier this week: (Insert video segment) The quote that matters starts around 1:25, when Elmendorf says that, according to CBO's estimates, with the stimulus legislation in place, "the level of GDP would be a little lower at the end. That is, a net negative effect on the growth of GDP over 10 years." Elmendorf then confirms that CBO estimates that the economic drag will continue in the following decade: SESSIONS: And in the next 10 years, since you’re carrying that debt...

The economic hardships brought about by the financial crisis and the weak recovery have reopened our longstanding national debate over the meaning of the proposition that we are all created equal. In the Founders' vision, the self-evident truth of this belief guaranteed all Americans equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To Abraham Lincoln, who led America at a time when this belief was most gravely threatened, it meant the equality of opportunity — "the promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an...

Have you been following this so-called supercommittee? They're the new superhero group of superfriends from the super-Congress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multitrillion-dollar abyss. There's Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry) and many other warriors for truth, justice and the American way of debt. The supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic. I had cynically assumed that the superfriends would address America's imminent debt catastrophe...

WASHINGTON - The richest 1 percent of Americans have been getting far richer over the last three decades while the middle class and poor have seen their after-tax household income only crawl up in comparison, according to a government study. After-tax income for the top 1 percent of U.S. households almost tripled, up 275 percent, from 1979 to 2007, the Congressional Budget Office found. For people in the middle of the economic scale, after-tax income grew by just 40 percent. Those at the bottom experienced an 18 percent increase. "The distribution of after-tax income in the United States was substantially...