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Re: New CBO health law estimate shows much higher spending past first 10 years
The report also assumes an average annual real GDP growth rate of 3.1%. The next year we were in a recession. Regardless, that's the whole point. We have no way of projecting the potential policy changes, economic shocks, geopolitical events, natural catastrophes, and the million other exogenous factors that contribute to these projections. However, we can project future budgetary expenses much more accurately. You're free to look at my other post regarding Obama's budget revenue projections as well. Note the difference in spending vs. revenues deltas.
If you have the report, please link it. As shown in my first post in this thread the March 2010 CBO report sent to Pelosi used 2010-2019 projections to estimate $940 billion in gross costs. I'm assuming that's the figure the President was referring to in his speech. If you have a different report, it would do nothing to dispute the underlying point. Either Obama is referring to only 6 years of actual costs or the projected cost doubled. Your last post seems to contradict your first.
The failings of that prediction have less to do with an overestimation of economic growth (although that was part of it), and more to do with not predicting what future Congresses would do. In January 2001 the CBO didn't include the deficit-exploding changes of the Bush tax cuts, 9/11, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, cleaning up Hurricane Katrina, annual Medicare doc fixes, economic stimuli, TARP, or plenty of other things. And I would argue that it was perfectly reasonable NOT to include those things, since the CBO had no idea that they were going to happen. The CBO's $5.6 trillion surplus projection was based solely on the policies that were already in place when they made that prediction in January 2001; $5.6 trillion would have been an overestimate anyway, but not nearly as much. It isn't fair to blame the CBO for not predicting the behavior of future Congresses.
The report also assumes an average annual real GDP growth rate of 3.1%. The next year we were in a recession. Regardless, that's the whole point. We have no way of projecting the potential policy changes, economic shocks, geopolitical events, natural catastrophes, and the million other exogenous factors that contribute to these projections. However, we can project future budgetary expenses much more accurately. You're free to look at my other post regarding Obama's budget revenue projections as well. Note the difference in spending vs. revenues deltas.
No, this is not correct. At the time the Affordable Care Act was passed, the CBO actually issued projections for the first ten years and the second ten years. Every year in the current projection (2012-2022) had an estimate at the time the law was passed...which were generally pretty similar to the current estimates. There wasn't any waiting involved to the discover the 10-year cost. The CBO just prefers to break its predictions up into 10-year chunks, but they predicted more years into the future than that.
If you have the report, please link it. As shown in my first post in this thread the March 2010 CBO report sent to Pelosi used 2010-2019 projections to estimate $940 billion in gross costs. I'm assuming that's the figure the President was referring to in his speech. If you have a different report, it would do nothing to dispute the underlying point. Either Obama is referring to only 6 years of actual costs or the projected cost doubled. Your last post seems to contradict your first.