Category Archives: Budget & Debt
CBO’s New Way to Evaluate Fiscal Consolidation Plans
In its recently released budget outlook, the Congressional Budget Office projects that this year’s federal deficit will increase by 35% from last year to $590 billion, and that the debt will rise from $14 trillion to $23 trillion by 2026, or … Continue reading
An Economic and Security Policy Blueprint for America
A timely new policy book, Blueprint for America, edited by George P. Shultz, is being released today online for the first time. The release coincides with the start of platform writing by Republicans this week and Democrats the following week, … Continue reading
Debt Explosion Still Looks Like July 4th Fireworks
Six years ago, on July 4, 2010, in a post on this blog, I plotted the CBO’s projection of the ratio of federal debt to GDP because it reminded me so much of the Fourth of July fireworks. What does … Continue reading
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Surprising Findings at the Macro Handbook Conferences
In order to further progress on the new Handbook of Macroeconomics, which will be published next year, Harald Uhlig and I, the co-editors of the Handbook, hosted two conferences at Stanford and Chicago in April. Harald and I attended both … Continue reading
Extreme Policies Are a Big Problem, Despite Naysayer
In a recent post, Paul Krugman commented on my Wall Street Journal article published this week. He tries to go after two paragraphs in particular, but misses on both. In the next to last paragraph of the article, I argue that … Continue reading
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What Line Will the House-Senate Budget Conference Draw?
The new House-Senate Budget Conference chaired by Paul Ryan and Patty Murray is supposed to reconcile the House and Senate budget resolutions passed earlier this year make a set of new recommendations. The House and Senate will then vote on … Continue reading
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Debt Explosion Unchanged: Looks the Same as Five Years Ago
The CBO’s 2013 Long-Term Budget Outlook released this week made a lot of news because it appeared to paint a new and surprisingly bleak budget picture. But in reality, the budget outlook is little changed from CBO’s long-term budget outlook … Continue reading
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CBO Is Late, Fireworks Postponed
For the past several years, I contributed to the 4th of July fireworks by posting (here and here for example) on CBO’s latest explosive debt projections, regularly released as part of its long-term outlook just before Independence Day. But this year the CBO is way … Continue reading
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Coding Errors, Austerity, and Exploding Debt
The discovery of errors in the Reinhart-Rogoff paper on the growth-debt nexus is already impacting policy. A participant in last Friday’s G20 meetings told me that the error was a factor in the decision to omit specific deficit or debt-to-GDP … Continue reading
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An Opportunity to Compare and Contrast Budgets
It is good news that we now have both House and Senate budget proposals for FY 2014 to compare and contrast. This is a first step back toward old-fashioned regular budget order which will help get the country off of … Continue reading
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Economics One 