An admission from the Congressional Budget Office: Factor in the “doc fix”, and one finds that $59 billion is added to the deficit over the next ten years.
Remind me why anyone is supposed to think that the health care reform bill before the House is the best bill that we can get.
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
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Posted in Chequer-Board
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Budget Deficit, Congress, Democrats, Doc Fix, economy, health care, Health Care Policy, Health Care Reform, National Debt, Obama Administration
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March 15, 2010 – 10:30 pm
So I see Paul Krugman has thrown his lot in with the neoconservatives who disdain multilateral institutions and prefer bellicose unilateralism when they confront a frustrating international situation.
–Dan Drezner. As I have written before, Krugman deserves his Nobel Prize. But it is exceedingly difficult–at best–to take him seriously as a pundit, or a would-be policymaker. More justly-earned criticism from Free Exchange.
March 15, 2010 – 10:22 pm
Andrew Biggs critiques the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’s own critique of the Ryan fiscal roadmap. Key passage:
What’s a little disappointing is that the Congressional Budget Office report on Ryan’s plan has been available since late January, so there’s no need to rely on outdated Social Security Administration analyses of older versions of Ryan’s proposals.
Well, yes there is, if one wants to attack Paul Ryan for partisan purposes. But that’s about the only excuse.
March 14, 2010 – 10:24 pm
I suppose, as a fan of Rep. Paul Ryan, that I should be concerned that Krugman is going on, and on, and on about how bad the Ryan Fiscal Roadmap is; this is his latest post on the subject.
But then, I recall that Krugman doesn’t even seem to understand what he has written in his own economics textbook, and that he has a tendency to grossly mislead his readers when it comes to discussing the ideas of people Krugman doesn’t like. Remembering all of this, I think that I will put more stock in Ryan’s arguments.
March 11, 2010 – 11:17 pm
This ought to kill off some shibboleths . . . assuming, of course, that the mainstream press will do its job and point out the fact that the Obama Administration is peddling misinformation about the economy, and about its own efforts to rescue the country from recession and depression.
I will say that I am more sympathetic to Ben Bernanke than the article appears to be. But that’s about my only major difference with it.
More people should be outraged over the fact that the Obama Administration has settled into a default protectionist stance on the issue of trade. Restricting trade will do nothing whatsoever to improve our economy; if anything, protectionism only increases the chances that we will experience a double-dip recession. And yet, the Obama Administration does not seem to be willing to do anything in order to further the process of trade liberalization.
Building an economic Fortress America has never brought us prosperity in the past. It is impossible to see how it will bring us anything resembling prosperity in the future. And it is impossible to see how an administration that says it is committed to improving the economy could be taken seriously when it allows protectionism to run rampant in U.S. trade policy.
But finances may cause the U.S. Postal Service to end Saturday deliveries. Over at his blog, Eric Zorn facetiously argues that we ought to get all of our mail on Saturdays, with every other day being mail-free. Of course, that argument is ridiculous, but perhaps only just barely ridiculous; it is difficult to imagine a monopoly as useless and value-less as the one that the Postal Service currently “enjoys.”
It’s not much fun reading this report:
Friday’s better-than-expected jobs report, while cheering stock investors, hasn’t taken the threat of a double-dip recession off the table.
Even as the jobless rate held steady at 9.7 percent and the 36,000 workers laid off in February was much less than expected, economists and investment analysts said it’s still too early to discount the economy’s chances of revisiting recession.
Remind me once again why I was supposed to think that government could effectively administer a public option for health care. As we can see, it can’t even competently manage its own finances:
A new congressional report released Friday says the United States’ long-term fiscal woes are even worse than predicted by President Barack Obama’s grim budget submission last month.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obama’s budget plans would generate deficits over the upcoming decade that would total $9.8 trillion. That’s $1.2 trillion more than predicted by the administration.
The agency says its future-year predictions of tax revenues are more pessimistic than the administration’s. That’s because CBO projects slightly slower economic growth than the White House.
We have occasion to comment on some strange written offerings from Paul Krugman. Yeah, I know, “dog bites man.” Nevertheless, some discussion is in order.
Peter Suderman’s article on why we cannot trust CBO estimates concerning the value of the stimulus is a must-read:
Here’s what the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) most recent report on the matter estimates the stimulus’ effects were in the fourth quarter of 2009: Thanks to the stimulus, America is somewhere between 1 and 2.1 million jobs richer than it would have been with no government intervention. Federal dollars have fattened up our GDP as well, adding somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 percent to the GDP.
Naturally, the Obama administration is keen to take credit. And in touting the CBO’s stimulus figures, the White House repeatedly employed the phrase “created or saved.” After widespread eye-rolling at such an obvious rhetorical gimmick—not to mention significant evidence that many of the jobs it was claiming credit for were not, in fact, created or saved—the administration altered its lingo and started referring to jobs “funded.” But this too is not as accurate as it could be, at least in the context of the CBO’s reports; a better phrase might have been “created or saved or estimated or assumed.”
