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Failure: ObamaCare fans are cheering the latest Congressional Budget Office report, which appears to show that it will cost less and cover more people than expected. But that's true only if you ignore reality. We don't always agree with the CBO, but we have long respected it as a credible source of budget numbers. Sure, its projections almost never turn out to be true. But simply too many variables are at play for anyone to guess such things perfectly, and it provides a more or less independent source of information on highly charged, partisan issues. But the CBO's latest report...

The Congressional Budget Office released a report this morning that has received a lot of attention from ObamaCare’s many staunch media advocates because it essentially concludes that the cost of expanding coverage through the exchanges will be billions less than the CBO was predicting just a couple of months ago. That’s great news for the president’s crowning legislative achievement, right? Health-insurance premiums for plans sold on the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges will be lower than previously expected, according to a report released Monday by the Congressional Budget Office.The findings, by Congress’s nonpartisan spending analysts, result largely from the fact that...

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) lowered the projected cost of ObamaCare's health insurance benefits Monday by $104 billion over 10 years. The law's insurance coverage provisions will now cost close to $1.4 trillion between 2015 and 2024, about $100 billion less than previously estimated, the CBO said. What is driving the lowered estimate? According to the report released by CBO, it has primarily to do with lower-than-expected premiums for exchange policies. So, good news for the Obama administration? Not so fast. Per CBO: A crucial factor in the current revision was an analysis of the characteristics of plans offered through...

The standard media coverage of President Obama's new budget claimed the proposals will cut $600 billion in spending over the next decade. It was just about impossible, though, to find any media story mentioning some basic numbers that belong in any story about a new federal budget. How much money is the federal government spending this year? How does that compare to what it spent last year, or expects to spend next year? Perhaps the reason for this failure is because the real numbers don't match up with the storyline. For example, in the current year, the federal government is...

February was not kind to supporters of the liberal agenda. In the span of four weeks, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released four separate reports, each concluding that misguided big government policies are hurting American businesses and families. CBO first reported in early February that President Obama’s healthcare law will drive millions out of full time work and push our ballooning national debt to $27 trillion dollars. A second report released by the CBO concluded that a mandated hike in the minimum wage to $10.10 would kill 500,000 jobs, mostly for low-wage workers. And a third report suggested that...

Less than half the public support a sharp boost in the minimum wage when told that it could cost the economy half a million jobs, according to the latest IBD/TIPP Poll out Thursday. That comes amid reports that some Senate Democrats are backing away from President Obama´s push to boost the minimum wage by 39% over the next two years, to $10.10 an hour, after the Congressional Budget Office found that it would kill 500,000 jobs. Unlike other surveys, the IBD/TIPP Poll asked two questions about the minimum wage.

1) Obamacare Will Destroy 2.5 Million Jobs By 2024 ... 2) In 2024, There Will Still Be 31 Million People In The U.S. Without Health Insurance ... 3) Surprise! Millions Of People Who Liked Their Health Plan Will Lose Their Health Plan ... 5) Your Paycheck Will Be Smaller Thanks To Obamacare

The critics are right, however, that some people will choose to work less because they qualify for a tax-credit based subsidy. If not for this government program, they would have to work harder and employment numbers would be higher. So might total output or gross domestic product. This aspect of the Affordable Care Act distorts economic efficiency. But don't kid yourself that this is anything new. Social Security has the same effect. About 41 million people currently get Social Security retirement benefits. Many still do work, at least part-time. But most do not. If not for their monthly checks, which...

President Obama, despite analysis and facts to the contrary, stated this week that the Congressional Budget Office's analysis on raising the minimum wage is wrong. Instead, the President pushed his own narrative, seemingly making up numbers out of thin air. In their analysis, released this month, the CBO found that raising the minimum wage to President Obama's proposed $10.10 would have catastrophic effects on employment rates. Quoting directly from the source, the CBO stated: According to CBO’s central estimate, implementing the $10.10 option would reduce employment by roughly 500,000 workers in the second half of 2016, relative to what would...

If there is a single lesson that the Obama administration is committed to not learning, it is that economics involves tradeoffs. A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office contains what the administration must surely receive as good news: Its plan to raise the minimum wage to the Democrats’ new target of $10.10 could lift as many as 900,000 Americans out of poverty. The bad news is that it would cast 500,000 American into unemployment by eliminating their jobs. In December, the president claimed that there is “no solid evidence” that raising the minimum wage costs jobs, an assessment that...

I’m treating it as good news. At least 500,000 people won’t have to worry about “job-lock” now.There’s no problem here that indefinite unemployment benefits can’t solve, my friends. Once fully implemented in the second half of 2016, the $10.10 option would reduce total employment by about 500,000 workers, or 0.3 percent, CBO projects (see the table below). As with any such estimates, however, the actual losses could be smaller or larger; in CBO’s assessment, there is about a two-thirds chance that the effect would be in the range between a very slight reduction in employment and a reduction in employment...

With election season upon us and the Democrats' generic ballot numbers declining, President Obama has done the only thing he could do -- delay, again, the employer mandate in Obamacare. The new delay will run until 2016. The delay comes after a Congressional Budget Office report found anecdotal evidence of employers already shifting employees to part-time employment. The report also noted "(b)eginning in 2015, employers of 50 or more full-time equivalent workers that do not offer health insurance ... may respond to the employer penalty by seeking to reduce or limit their full-time staffing and to hire more part-time employees."...

In our current age of spin and counter-spin, there is no contortion too great for a politician to attempt. On occasion, however, the threads of one story become entangled with another in a manner that should deeply embarrass, if the media were sharp enough to catch it. This happened last week in response to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) bombshell report on how Obamacare incentives could reduce the size of the labor force by more than two million workers by 2017. While the report did not reflect the Republican spin (that the law will cause employers to kill jobs -...

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is acting in a bipartisan way to cover up the biggest single threat to the bipartisan political alliance that is stripping America of its wealth: the United States Congress. There is no question that the following policy is bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans in Congress are completely agreed that the following information should not get out to the American people, namely, that the present value of the United States government’s off-budget liabilities is over $200 trillion. The CBO has two sets of books. This is what any Ponzi scheme requires. It releases one set of books...

The Obama machine is scrambling to minimize damage inflicted by the Congressional Budget Office's report that Obamacare will have a negative impact on employment, delaying yet again parts of the employer mandate, and forcing employers to swear Orwellian oaths that they won't cut workers. But a full reading of the CBO report shows that job loss could be even worse than previously reported. The CBO report concludes that the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs will be lost due to Obamacare, primarily because of decisions made by workers. But, like Holmes's dog that didn't bark, the report may be even more...

JAY CARNEY: First of all, let me just correct you. You asked about the deficit. As the CBO reported yesterday, consistent with what is reported in the past, the CBO projects that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars. (snip) And I think one hugely significant one is the historic reduction in health care inflation that we've seen. We've had the slowest rate of health care cost growth in 50 years since the Affordable Care Act was passed, which directly contradict those who oppose the Affordable Care Act. ..... The CBO report says specifically, contrary...

<p>For the next few years, deficits are looking pretty good. But the interest owed on the country's cumulative debt is set to nearly quadruple over the next decade.</p> <p>The Congressional Budget Office projects that interest will be $233 billion this year, or 1.3% as a share of the economy.</p>

On the same day House Speaker John Boehner said he would bring a “clean” debt ceiling bill to the House floor—and join Democrats in voting for a 13-month extension of the debt limit—the head of the Congressional Budget Office declared that the “large and growing federal debt” could eventually increase the risk of a “fiscal crisis.” […] CBO estimates that federal debt held by the public will equal 74 percent of GDP at the end of this year and 79 percent in 2024 (the end of the current 10-year projection period). Such large and growing federal debt could have serious...

Yes, I suppose it’s true that most of the rest of the world works a lot less than Americans do. Their GDPs-per-capita and/or their debt-to-GDP ratios generally tend to correlate accordingly, but whatever. Via RCP:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO What the Congressional Budget Office is saying is that we’re going to discourage kids having to have latchkeys. We’re going to have parents being able to come home, working reasonable hours. People are going to be able to retire. People might be able to actually cook dinner rather than have to order out and get some takeout. I mean, the...

<p>In 2010, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi touted the Affordable Care Act as a bill "not only about the health security of America; it's about jobs. In its life, it will create 4 million jobs, 400,000 jobs almost immediately."</p> <p>A newly released Congressional Budget Office analysis reported that Obamacare is expected to shrink the workforce by 2.5 million full-time jobs by 2024. So you can stow that Pelosi quote in the warehouse of discarded Obamacare promises. Grab a forklift, and you can park it behind President Barack Obama's pledge, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it."</p>