Showing posts with label CBO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CBO. Show all posts

Saturday, November 20, 2021

$2.2 trillion Build Back Butter bill Democrats insisted would cost nothing CBO estimates would cost $367 billion over ten years



 

 

 

 

 

 

So-called Democrat moderates in the House voted for it anyway, 220-213, undermining Republican claims their votes could be peeled away once the infrastructure bill had been passed separately.

Between the $250 billion cost of the infrastructure bill and the $367 billion cost of the Build Back Better bill, the optimistic CBO estimated combined ten year costs will dig a $617 billion hole in addition to the $6.8 TRILLION in fiscal year deficits for 2020 and 2021 spent since the onset of the pandemic to alleviate it.

The pandemic spending orgy, which was bipartisan, makes this all seem like a kerfuffle about relatively little.

Already pared back from $3.5 trillion or more in spending, the BBB faces an uncertain future in the Senate. The wild spending dreams of progressives may have been dashed, but anyone who pretends any of this makes any sense is crazy.

The country is currently holding at $28.9 TRILLION in debt, and is set to explode higher pending the raising of the debt ceiling. 

From the story


The final outcome wasn't much in doubt after centrist Democrats' deficit concerns largely melted away.

The vote came hours after the Congressional Budget Office issued its official cost estimate of the sweeping legislation, which moderate Democrats eagerly awaited to ease their concerns over the fiscal impact. The Biden administration and Democratic backers of the bill have insisted it would pay for itself and not add to federal deficits.

The nonpartisan CBO, the official scorekeeper, offered a cost estimate with a little wiggle room. It said the measure would increase deficits by $367 billion over 10 years — but that doesn't count additional revenue that could come from increased IRS tax enforcement.

How much new revenue that effort would yield has been hotly debated. The White House has said increased enforcement, aided by an additional $80 billion in IRS funding, would produce $480 billion in new revenue over a decade. The CBO took a more cautious view, saying the effort might produce $207 billion.

Monday, November 8, 2021

Republicans voted for the Biden infrastructure bill despite the CBO's estimate it would add $250 billion+ to the national debt over 10 years

 Is $25 billion a year a big deal?

We're already paying $500 billion+ EVERY YEAR in interest expense on the debt.

Nobody cares.

 


 


Saturday, November 6, 2021

Bi-partisan Senate infrastructure plan authorizing $550 billion in new spending passed the House late last night and goes to Biden for his signature

The bill was opposed in the House by almost all Republicans, and by six far-left Democrats who were outmaneuvered by thirteen moderate Republicans who threw their support to the plan, which 19 Republican US Senators had voted for earlier this summer. 

The House progressives had insisted that the infrastructure plan be voted on together with Biden's social spending plan in order to force moderate Democrats to go along with the latter. The House Republican votes for the Senate bill ended up thwarting that linkage, making it even more likely that the House version of the social spending plan will have to be much less ambitious.

A small group of House Democrats have insisted the Congressional Budget Office score the impact of the separate social spending plan, which would have been standard operating procedure under Republicans but which Democrats under Pelosi have been avoiding until now. They don't give a damn about the true costs. They've even claimed absurdly a $3.5 trillion social spending plan will cost NOTHING. Ha ha ha ha ha.

That ranks among the most shameless attempts to change reality through a talking point ever attempted.

Whatever comes out of the House on that will face the hard scrutiny of Democrat Senators Manchin and Sinema regardless. 

Roll Call:

The bipartisan bill would reauthorize surface transportation and water programs for five years, adding $550 billion in new spending. 

It includes $110 billion for roads, bridges and major projects; $39 billion for transit and $66 billion for rail; $65 billion for broadband; $65 billion for the electric grid; $55 billion to upgrade water infrastructure and $25 billion for airports.

WaPo:

The bill includes more than $110 billion to replace and repair roads, bridges and highways, and $66 billion to boost rail, making it the most substantial such investment in the country’s passenger and commercial network since the creation of Amtrak about half a century ago. Lawmakers provided $55 billion to improve the nation’s water supply and replace lead pipes, $60 billion to modernize the power grid and billions in additional sums to expand speedy Internet access nationwide.

Many of the investments aim to promote green energy and combat some of the country’s worst sources of pollution. At Biden’s behest, for example, lawmakers approved $7.5 billion to build out a national network of vehicle charging stations. Reflecting the deadly, costly consequences of global warming, the package also allocates another roughly $50 billion to respond to emergencies including droughts, wildfires and major storms.

Monday, August 2, 2021

"two-year suspension of the debt ceiling expired at the end of July"

Pure gobbledygook.

The limit, a facet of American politics for over a century, prevents the Treasury from issuing new bonds to fund government activities once a certain debt level is reached. That level reached $22 trillion in August 2019 and was suspended until Saturday. 

The new debt limit will include Washington’s additional borrowing since summer 2019. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in July that the new cap will likely come in just north of $28.5 trillion.

More gobbledygook.

The government's bookkeeping shenanigans here are always amazing, but especially now given the orgy of spending during the pandemic, and the reporting is nearly as bad.

The debt ceiling was "set" at $22 trillion in August 2019, but it wasn't "reached" until April 2021.

Add in the ever present "intragovernmental" borrowings and the total debt is now $28.46 trillion at the end of July. Intragovernmental holdings is code for raiding the Medicare and Social Security Trust Funds. It's one of the weird things about how bureaucrats think that the extent to which they must raid those funds plus the "normal" public debt becomes the sum they'll use to set the new "public" portion, the debt ceiling, when Congress gets around to it.

They all should be in jail. Instead we are.






Sunday, July 2, 2017

I got your frickin' CBO score right here

Government at all levels now costs 36% of GDP.

We can't afford another pencil.



Friday, June 30, 2017

The servile Kim Strassel has no fight in her, thinks the Senate healthcare bill simply comes down to pre-existing conditions

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
From the story here, where Strassel counsels bowing to federal mandates, which means bowing to the left-wing extremist who bankrupted America:

Republicans lost this argument nearly a decade ago, when Mr. Obama won. More than 90% of Senate Republicans understand this.

Which is another way of saying that protections for pre-existing conditions are here to stay, and conservatives face a choice. They can work with their colleagues to minimize the costs of the mandates (there are innovative ways to do this) and build in different free-market reforms to lower premiums. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the current Senate bill will reduce premiums by about 30%, and the GOP can and should build on this.

Yes, the simple solution is always to bow, to submit, whether to the king, or to Allah.

Real Americans don't settle for easy.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

US House hasn't sent Obamacare repeal to Senate, waiting for budget score from CBO

It's been two weeks already. These people are soooooooooooooooo unserious.

Story here.

Sunday, December 11, 2016

The Obamacare failure: 10 million buy plans on exchanges, 9 million buy off-exchange

Sally Pipes, here:

These off-exchange plans were never expected to be popular, especially compared to the government's marketplaces. As recently as 2013, the Congressional Budget Office was projecting that 24 million Americans would buy insurance through ObamaCare's exchanges by 2016. The CBO didn't even bother to predict enrollment figures for off-exchange plans.

Those projections missed the mark. Last year, off-exchange enrollment — 9 million — was within 1 million of that inside the exchanges. Some 2.5 million people have purchased off-exchange coverage even though they would've qualified for income-based subsidies through the exchanges. Almost half this group may also be eligible for additional federal subsidies aimed at reducing out-of-pocket costs for low-income individuals.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Democrats broke nearly every promise about ObamaCare

Jack Kelly here:

Nearly every promise Democrats made has been broken. The average family pays more (some much more) for insurance, not $2,500 less. About 9 million Americans (so far) have learned they couldn’t keep the health plans they had if they wanted. Or some of their doctors.

Federal spending for health didn’t go down. It’s zoomed upward. So have emergency room visits. Overhead costs are exploding.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obamacare will lower full-time employment by 2.3 million in 2021, compared with what might have been without reform.

The ACA has hurt millions more than it’s helped. The worst is yet to come. President Barack Obama delayed or altered (mostly illegally) unpopular provisions at least 50 times. If they’re implemented fully, up to 100 million who get insurance from their employers could have their policies canceled, the American Enterprise Institute has estimated.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Congressional Budget Office quietly predicts 1.5% real 2014 GDP one day before BEA.gov announcement

Is 2Q2014 GDP of 4% just a memory?

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (!) had the story here:

"The Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday forecast that the U.S. economy will grow by just 1.5 per cent in 2014, undermined by a poor performance during the first three months of the year."

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Low Wage Workers Get Reduced Hours, Probably Due To ObamaCare, The Rest Work More

So says Jed Graham for Investors.com, here, echoing our posts on part-timers who represent just 20% of the usually employed and are too few in number to ding the customary measures of hours, which are aggregate measures, when they are reduced because of ObamaCare considerations by their employers:

Low-wage workers clocked the shortest workweek on record in December — even shorter than at the depth of the recession, new Labor Department data showed Friday.

The figures underscore concerns about the ObamaCare employer insurance mandate's impact on the work hours and incomes of low-wage earners.

It's impossible to know how much of the drop relates to ObamaCare, but there's good reason to suspect a strong connection. The workweek has been getting shorter in many of the same industries where anecdotes have piled up about employers cutting hours to evade the law's penalties. ...

IBD's gauge of the low-wage workweek, now at 27.4 hours, includes the 30 million nonmanagers working in private industries where pay averages up to $14.50 an hour. ...

[T]he workweek has moved higher for non-low-wage workers. This group, including managers and those in higher-paying industries, is now clocking a longer week than prior to the recession.

That divergence explains why many economists and nonpartisan arbiters like the Congressional Budget Office have concluded that ObamaCare has had no impact on part-time employment. The effect doesn't show up in aggregate workforce data, but that is the wrong place to look.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Obamacare has been undermined by the very entity, CBO, Obama used to validate it.

So says Dana Milbank for WaPo, here:

The law would reduce the workforce in 2021 by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time workers, well more than the 800,000 originally anticipated. ...

This is grim news for the White House and for Democrats on the ballot in November. This independent arbiter, long embraced by the White House, has validated a core complaint of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) critics: that it will discourage work and become an ungainly entitlement. Disputing Republicans’ charges is much easier than refuting the federal government’s official scorekeepers. ...

But there’s only so much White House officials could do. Obamacare has been undermined by the very entity they had used to validate it.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

How Rep. Paul Ryan Is Just Like Sen. Ted Cruz

Here in The Wall Street Journal on October 8th, Rep. Paul Ryan says he is willing to swap sequester cuts for cuts to mandatory spending:


If Mr. Obama decides to talk, he'll find that we actually agree on some things. For example, most of us agree that gradual, structural reforms are better than sudden, arbitrary cuts. For my Democratic colleagues, the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act are a major concern. And the truth is, there's a better way to cut spending. We could provide relief from the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act in exchange for structural reforms to entitlement programs.

And the reason is there's more to be gained over the long haul from cuts to the mandatory side, which is 60% of annual outlays anyway:


These reforms are vital. Over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office predicts discretionary spending—that is, everything except entitlement programs and debt payments—will grow by $202 billion, or roughly 17%. Meanwhile, mandatory spending—which mostly consists of funding for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—will grow by $1.6 trillion, or roughly 79%. The 2011 Budget Control Act largely ignored entitlement spending. But that is the nation's biggest challenge.

But just why Republicans like Paul Ryan expect us to believe they can negotiate cuts to mandatory programs from Democrats who have just rammed a new one called ObamaCare down our throats is quite beyond me. It's as unrealistic as Senator Ted Cruz thinking libertarian Republicans could get Obama to defund that program without unity in the party on the subject in the first place. Cynics quickly decided Cruz was just fundraising for 2016. And Rep. Ryan could just as plausibly be trying to re-establish some street cred with conservatives after his involvement with the Facebook-financed immigration amnesty debacle.

There's plenty of unrealism to go around in the Republican Party, which still hasn't figured out that Obama and the Democrats are the enemy, which is surprising since that's how he views them. But that seems to be a particularly libertarian penchant, expressed as it is in interminable losing electoral challenges throughout the country which do nothing but help elect Democrats. Maybe Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz are just libertarian spoilers on the national stage, for whom success is keeping Republicans from succeeding.

Figuring out how to proceed when your country has been taken over by a hostile foreign power without having fired a shot remains the central problem for an opposition which doesn't realize it is one, especially when your own ranks have been infiltrated by an enemy.

Where are the non-libertarian economic conservatives? 


Friday, December 28, 2012

Obama Raises Federal Pay $11 Billion Over 10 Years On Eve Of Fiscal Cliff

Now you know why Obama cut his vacation short . . . to raise spending! And rub our noses in it!

This guy is the biggest jerk ever to sit in the Oval Office, maybe excepting Lyndon Baines Johnson who reportedly pissed on the shoes of a soldier who dutifully stood at attention.

If ever anyone needed evidence that El Presidente couldn't care less about the consequences of federal spending for the fiscal situation, this is it. He's "in your face" about it, on the very eve of the biggest tax increase on the American people in living memory, and Republicans still take this guy seriously.

As reported here:

CBO [The Congressional Budget Office] says the (discretionary) cost of the .5% pay-hike the President is calling for in the Exec Order – relative to a freeze – is about $500m in FY 2013 and $11 billion over the ten years from FY 13 - FY 22.  The reason why the FY ’13 savings is only $500 million is because the pay hike as proposed by the President’s Exec Order would not go into effect until April 1st, 2013 - when the current CR [Continuing Resolution] expires. So it only covers half the fiscal year. The annualized cost of the pay hike is about $1 billion/year."

If Republicans had any imagination, they'd shut the damn government down . . . for the next two years, and teach Obama what it's like to run something. Teh.

That would save about $2 trillion of the taxpayers' money as government makes do with current revenues. The sound of the squealing pigs would be worth it.


Saturday, December 22, 2012

Real Retail Sales Still Remain Below The 2006 Peak

Real retail sales still remain below the December 1, 2006 peak of $180.016 billion. The latest report of real retail sales for November 1, 2012 puts them at $178.51 billion.

Graph and data here.

We still remain in a consumption depression nearly six years since the onset despite extending the Bush tax cuts for two years beyond their original expiration date, and despite the first ever emergency reductions to the payroll tax, rolled back 32% for both 2011 and 2012 from 6.2% of each paycheck to 4.2%:

"[F]or the economy as a whole the payroll tax cut amounted to about $112 billion in 2012 – or the equivalent of at least $300 for each person in the US," reports the Christian Science Monitor, here.

Given the 100% propensity to spend everything in a paycheck, the expiration of the payroll tax cut will remove that sum from current retail spending levels. And going back to the Clinton era tax rates in less than two weeks, on January 1, 2013, will mean transferring about $235 billion annually from taxpayers to federal coffers, according the Congressional Budget Office, as discussed here.

Together that's a theoretical annual hit to spending by the American people of nearly $350 billion.

Yet Democrats cry Forward! to these tax rates of the past despite the damage they are likely to cause.

We're not going to get over the hump that way.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Sorry Gov. Romney, We're Not Spain

Romney, last night, in another odd coincidence with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"Spain -- Spain spends 42 percent of their total economy on government. We're now spending 42 percent of our economy on government. I don't want to go down the path to Spain. I want to go down the path of growth that puts Americans to work with more money coming in because they're working."

A little dyslexia is going on here, I think. Whatever Spain's expense is as a percentage of GDP, America's is not 42, it's 24.

Here's US News and World Report, in June:


Federal spending was close to 20 percent under the Carter administration, dropped to 18 percent under Clinton, and is currently at an incredible 24 percent of GDP. According to the Congressional Budget Office, federal spending may hover around 22 percent for the next decade.

It's a little disturbing Obama didn't catch this mistake. It's a little disturbing Jim Lehrer didn't catch this mistake. In fact, I've heard the soundbite repeated on the radio this morning without anyone referring to the mistake, and that's pretty disturbing, too.

Does anyone really know what time it is?



Thursday, August 9, 2012

Welfare Practised Through The Tax Code Is Liberalism, Not Conservatism

This is why those who call Ronald Reagan a conservative are wrong, because the intent of his tax policies has been all along to practise welfare through the tax code and thereby create a whole class of people at the bottom half in the country who are dependent on the federal government on April 15th, have no stake in policy and thus in politics because they do not pay for it, and are as a result ungrateful, unmotivated to climb higher, and are increasingly a nation apart from the Americans who do pay for it:

"Reagan and succeeding Republicans abolished federal income taxes on the working poor and on what the Left calls the working class, and they almost abolished them on the middle class.

"It began with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which grew out of then-Governor Ronald Reagan's famous testimony before the Senate Finance Committee in 1972. Reagan proposed exempting the working poor from all Social Security and income taxes as an alternative to welfare, with the credit serving as a way to offset payroll taxes for low-income workers. ...

"[B]y 2007, after 25 years of Reaganomics and before President Obama was even elected, the bottom 40 percent of earners, on net and as a group, paid less than 0 percent of federal income taxes, according to official IRS data, as reported recently by the Congressional Budget Office. Instead of paying at least some income taxes to help support the federal government, the federal government paid them cash through the income tax code. That same year, the middle 20 percent, the true middle class, paid less than 5 percent of all federal income taxes."

So Peter Ferrara now, here, defending Romney's tax plan as more of the same.

These policies, now accepted by both Democrats and Republicans alike, have turned Social Security into pure welfare because a large majority of the people eventually receiving it will have effectively received refunds of everything they've put into it long before they start drawing it. Temporary reductions of contributions to Social Security during the recent financial crisis, advocated by Democrats in complete control of the government, have only underscored the point.

If nothing else it is another flip for Romney, who famously characterized himself as an independent and not in the mold of Reagan-Bush during his race for Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts in 1994.

"Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush."

Who knows, maybe the flipper will flop after he's elected. Stranger things have happened. After all, many of us on the right feared Obama in 2008 because we thought he was a commie. Little did we know he was a fascist.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick's Policy To Cleanse Army Of Christians

Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick, recently promoted to head the Army Corps of Engineers and infamous for his equation of principled religious objections to gays in the military with racism and bigotry, is the person chiefly responsible for the Army's new force reduction program announced in the Army Times last September:

The Army is preparing to launch in March [2012] a five-year, nearly 50,000-soldier drawdown, using a combination of accession cuts and voluntary and involuntary separations, similar to the post-Cold War drawdown of the 1990s, according to Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick, service personnel chief. ...

“We are currently reviewing the lessons drawn from the 1990s as captured in reports by the Army, Congressional Budget Office and the other services to ensure that we retain as much experience as possible from the ongoing conflicts (in Iraq and Afghanistan),” said a member of Bostick’s staff.

“As in the 1990s, the Army may need to conduct involuntary separations to meet mandated end-strength, but we will do everything we can to shape the force through competitive promotions, reclassifications and voluntary separations before we take harsher measures,” the official said.

Some force-shaping tools added to Army policy over the past two years include new, and stricter, retention control points for enlisted soldiers, a Qualitative Management Program to separate retirement-eligible senior noncommissioned officers who do not measure up to Army standards of behavior and performance, and the elimination of selective continuation for certain categories of officers who are twice passed over for promotion.

Gee, why have people who don't "measure up to Army standards of behavior" been allowed to remain in the ranks in the first place? Maybe because the standards being promulgated now are "new, and stricter", designed to weed-out undesirables like the Christians Bostick said had better comply or get out in these remarks in 2010:


“Unfortunately, we have a minority of service members who are still racists and bigoted and you will never be able to get rid of all of them,” Lt. Gen. Bostick said. “But these people opposing this new policy [homosexuals serving openly in the military] will need to get with the program, and if they can’t, they need to get out. No matter how much training and education of those in opposition, you’re always going to have those that oppose this on moral and religious grounds just like you still have racists today.”



Saturday, March 31, 2012

It Turns Out, The Cost Of Free-Riding Is A Straw Man Argument For ObamaCare

Thanks to Ronald Reagan's signature on EMTALA in 1986, hospitals must by law provide service to anyone, regardless of ability to pay among other things.

It turns out that the costs of this beneficence have indeed grown into a big problem, but it is nowhere near as big a problem as advocates of ObamaCare would like to make out.

Here's the government's best estimate of the problem, from the Congressional Budget Office, which everyone has known about since 2008 (italics added):

"A recent study by Hadley and others, which used that analytic approach, examined a sample of medical claims for uninsured individuals and projected that they would receive about $28 billion in uncompensated care in 2008. That study also examined cost reports from hospitals and a survey of doctors and generated a different estimate: The gross costs of providing uncompensated care would be about $43 billion in 2008, of which $35 billion would come from hospitals and $8 billion from doctors. Total spending on hospital care in 2008 is estimated to be about $750 billion, so those figures would imply that uncompensated care accounts for about 5 percent of hospital revenues, on average. Those findings are consistent with CBO’s analysis of uncompensated hospital care (cited above), which found that a sample of for-profit and nonprofit hospitals incurred costs for such care that averaged between 4 percent and 5 percent of their operating revenues."

So there you have it. The government has known all along that this  has been a problem in the neighborhood of 5 percent of the gross costs of care overall, yet it is preparing under ObamaCare to spend $200 billion annually to bring in the uninsured, almost 5 times as much as the problem warrants, wrecking insurance for everyone else in the process.