Economics Roundtable
Graph-of-the-Year Candidates
Donald Marron likes European interest rates. Click on the image to get a bigger version. Can you find three distinct subperiods?
Brad DeLong favors the U.S. gdp gap.
Finally, it's hard to argue against the payroll employment graph below (straight from FRED) and the comparison across recessions (courtesy of Calculated Risk).
Looking Up At 2001
In February 2001, U.S. payroll employment peaked at 132.5 million. The November 2011 figure of 131.7 million still falls 800,000 jobs short of the earlier peak.
Click on the chart for a larger version.
November Payroll Employment
Remember M1?
Money Supply M1 growth is now over 20% per year over a 12 month lag. M1 growth has touched 20% before, but not with excess reserves of $1.6 trillion. Where is M1 headed?
Click on the chart for a larger version.
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Director’s Blog (CBO)
Congressional Budget Office Director’s Blog. Peter R. Orszag.
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 ...
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. In ...
The Wall Street Journal has just published an article entitled “Congress’s Number Cruncher Comes Under Fire.” Here’s our view:
CBO is responsible for providing nonpartisan and thoughtful analysis to the Congress, and we are proud that our success in carrying out that mission, for more than 35 years, is widely acknowledged ...
This morning I testified before the House Budget Committee on our annual Budget and Economic Outlook that was released yesterday. My testimony highlighted many of the points that were included in yesterday’s blog post. One point I want to emphasize is the following: The combination of tax and ...
We have received many questions about whether potential reductions in spending for overseas contingency operations (OCO), such as U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, can be considered as offsets to reductions in taxes or additional spending for Medicare or other programs. In this blog post, I will try to explain the ...
This morning CBO released the Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2012 to 2022.
Each January, CBO prepares “baseline” budget projections spanning the next 10 years. Those projections are not a forecast of future events; rather, they are intended to provide a benchmark against which potential policy changes can be measured. ...
The federal government employs 2.3 million civilian workers, or 1.7 percent of the U.S. workforce, in over 700 occupations and spent about $200 billion in fiscal year 2011 to compensate them. Recently, concern about the federal budget and about equity between the public and private sectors has focused greater attention ...
In the past two decades, Medicare’s administrators have conducted demonstrations to test two broad approaches to enhancing the quality of health care and improving the efficiency of health care delivery in Medicare’s fee-for-service program. Disease management and care coordination demonstrations have sought to improve the quality of care of beneficiaries ...
Raising the ages at which people can begin to collect Medicare and Social Security benefits would be one way to lower federal outlays, raise revenues, and reduce long-term fiscal imbalances. A CBO issue brief released today reviews how ages of eligibility affect beneficiaries under current law and how delaying ...
Currently, the federal government and state and local governments face calls for more and better highways but confront budgetary constraints in providing them. Some analysts have suggested that public-private partnerships might supply at least a portion of that capacity by providing additional financing for road projects and improving the efficiency ...