Politics

CBO: Deficit to Shrink to Lowest Level of Obama Presidency

Published

10 years ago

January 27, 2015

In this March 4, 2014 file photo, copies of President Barack Obama’s proposed fiscal 2015 budget are set out for distribution on Capitol Hill in Washington. The Congressional Budget Office says the federal budget deficit will shrink this year to its lowest level since President Barack Obama took office. CBO says the deficit will be $468 billion for the budget year that ends in September. Thats slightly less than last years $483 billion deficit. As a share of the economy, CBO says this years deficit will be slightly below the historical average of the past 50 years. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Solid economic growth will help the federal budget deficit shrink this year to its lowest level since President Barack Obama took office, according to congressional estimates released Monday.

The Congressional Budget Office also projects a 14 percent drop in the number of U.S. residents without health insurance, largely because of Obama’s health law.

In a report released Monday, CBO says the deficit will be $468 billion for the budget year that ends in September. That’s slightly less than last year’s $483 billion deficit.

The official scorekeeper of Congress projects solid economic growth for the next few years, with unemployment dropping slightly.

“In CBO’s estimation, increases in consumer spending, business investment and residential investment will drive the economic expansion this year and over the next few years,” the report said.

CBO also cited wage increases, rising wealth and the recent decline in oil prices.

For future years however, CBO issued a warning: Beyond 2018, deficits will start rising again as more baby boomers retire and enroll in Social Security and Medicare. By 2025, annual budget deficits could once again top $1 trillion, unless Congress acts.

At that point, Social Security benefits would account for one-quarter of all federal spending, said CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf.

“The underlying point is that we have a handful of very large federal programs that provide benefits to older Americans,” Elmendorf said. “And with the rising number of older Americans and a rising cost of health care, those programs get much more expensive.”

CBO says the number of U.S. residents without health insurance will drop from 42 million last year to 36 million this year, largely because of Obama’s health law. These numbers don’t include people who are in the U.S. illegally, who are ineligible for subsidies under the health law.

The report says 19 million people will have health insurance because of the law, which could make it harder for congressional Republicans to make good on promises to repeal it.

Obama inherited an economy in recession when he took office. The annual deficit topped $1 trillion for each of his first four years in office, including a record $1.4 trillion in 2009.

As a share of the economy, CBO says this year’s deficit will be slightly below the historical average of the past 50 years.

The federal budget deficit became a big issue during Obama’s early years in office. In 2011, Obama and congressional Republicans struck a deal that resulted in significant spending cuts at many government agencies. At the start of 2013, Obama persuaded Congress to further address the deficit by raising taxes on top earners.

The White House said Monday that Congress still has more to do. “CBO’s longer-term budget and economic projections confirm the need for Congress to act to strengthen our economy for the middle class while putting our debt and deficits on a sustainable trajectory, including by making the investments that will accelerate economic growth and generate good new jobs for our workers to fill,” Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz said in a statement.

Declining budget deficits, however, could reduce pressure on Congress to continue addressing the government’s finances.

“Over the last few years as deficits have fallen, so too has the effectiveness of Republican rhetoric about a ‘big government’ boogeyman,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y. “Now is the time for Republicans to join with Democrats to invest in constructive programs that help middle-class Americans climb the ladder and achieve the American dream.”

Republicans, however, signaled that they aren’t done cutting spending.

“Thanks to Republicans’ efforts to cut spending this year’s deficit is projected to be smaller, but in order to balance the budget we must address the true drivers of our debt,” said Cory Fritz, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. “Real, robust economic growth won’t occur until we solve our government’s spending problem.”

CBO projects that the economy will grow at an annual rate of 3 percent in both 2015 and 2016. In later years, however, CBO projects slower economic growth as more baby boomers retire and the labor force grows more slowly than it did in the 1980s and 1990s.

CBO projects the unemployment rate will gradually decrease to 5.3 percent in 2017. It is now 5.6 percent.

“CBO’s report is important, but it only tells us part of the story,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent and the ranking minority member of the Senate Budget Committee. “What we must never forget is that tens of millions of Americans today are struggling to keep their heads above water economically while the disparity between the rich and everyone else is growing wider every day.”

The budget agency bases its budget projections on current law, assuming that temporary provisions will be allowed to expire. However, many temporary laws are routinely extended, including dozens of temporary tax breaks and a provision that prevents steep cuts in Medicare payments to doctors.

Future budget deficits would be higher if those provisions are continued. For example, if dozens of temporary tax breaks are extended, they would add $1 trillion to the deficit over the next decade.

___

Follow Stephen Ohlemacher on Twitter: http://twitter.com/stephenatap

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U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Published

15 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

Published

15 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.