Congressional Budget Office
Director's Blog

In addition to the information provided in my testimony yesterday, you can find further information on trends in federal revenues and how changes to U.S. tax law would affect the behavior of taxpayers and the economy in the following CBO publications:

• Trends and projections of federal revenues are discussed in The Budget and Economic Outlook: An Update (August 2010); and Sources of the Growth and Decline in Individual Income Tax Revenues Since 1994 (May 2008).
• Analyses of the effects of tax policy options on economic activity are discussed in Statement of Douglas W. Elmendorf, Director, Congressional Budget Office, before the Senate Committee on the Budget, The Economic Outlook and Fiscal Policy Choices (September 28, 2010); An Analysis of the President’s Budgetary Proposals for Fiscal Year 2011 (March 2010); and Analyzing the Economic and Budgetary Effects of a 10 Percent Cut in Income Tax Rates (December 2005).
• The effects of tax rates on economic activity are examined in The Effect of Tax Changes on Labor Supply in CBO’s Microsimulation Tax Model, Background Paper (April 2007); Computing Effective Tax Rates on Capital Income, Background Paper (December 2006); Effective Marginal Tax Rates on Labor Income (November 2005); and Taxing Capital Income: Effective Rates and Approaches to Reform (October 2005).
• Subsidies to expenditures through the tax code are discussed in An Overview of Federal Support for Housing, Issue Brief (November 3, 2009); Key Issues in Analyzing Major Health Insurance Proposals (December 2008), pp. 29–37; The Deductibility of State and Local Taxes (February 2008); and Statement of Peter R. Orszag, Director, Congressional Budget Office, before the House Committee on the Budget, Performance Budgeting: Applications to Health Insurance Programs and Tax Policy (September 20, 2007).
• Supplemental analyses and detailed data on average federal tax rates and income, by income category, for 1979 to 2007, are available at www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/collections.cfm?collect=13.
• Issues involving tax rates and how household income changes over time are discussed in Effective Tax Rates: Comparing Annual and Multiyear Measures (January 2005).

Today I testified before the Senate Finance Committee on historical trends in federal tax revenues and rates. My written testimony is a collection of tables and figures with descriptive text (shown below). It addresses three broad topics: revenues collected by the federal government, how taxes affect economic activity, and the tax burden and who bears it.

Federal Revenues: Trends and Projections

Total federal revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) change over time because the size of the tax base for each source changes relative to GDP, because changes in the distribution of income can raise or lower average tax rates, and because changes in tax law affect the amount of revenues collected from a particular tax base. As detailed in the first three exhibits:

• Over the past 40 years, federal revenues have ranged from nearly 21 percent of GDP in fiscal year 2000 to less than 15 percent in fiscal years 2009 and 2010, averaging 18 percent of GDP over that span. Most of the revenues—about 82 percent in 2010—come from the individual income tax and the payroll taxes used to finance Social Security, Medicare, and the federal unemployment insurance program (see Exhibit 1).
• Under current law, revenues will rise significantly from their recent low relative to GDP as the economy recovers from the recession and the tax reductions enacted in 2001, 2003, and 2009 expire. We project that under current law, federal revenues will reach 21 percent of GDP in fiscal year 2020, just above their peak share reached 10 years ago (see Exhibit 2).
• We also project that under current law, federal spending will reach nearly 24 percent in 2020—slightly lower than the peak level of almost 25 percent in fiscal year 2009 but well above the average of roughly 21 percent over the past four decades. Compared with that historical experience, the components of federal spending that are projected to be unusually large relative to GDP by 2020 are the expenditures for Social Security and the federal health programs.
• Even with the projected substantial increase in revenues, under current law deficits between 2015 and 2020 will range between 2.6 percent and 3.0 percent of GDP. If the Congress extended most or all of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and made no other changes to taxes and spending, revenues would be lower and deficits would be significantly larger (see Exhibit 3).

How Taxes Affect Economic Activity: Marginal Tax Rates and Tax Expenditures

Taxes raise the price of taxed activities and thereby lower the relative price of other activities. In particular, the income tax and payroll tax reduce the returns from working, and the income tax reduces the returns from saving. One measure of the effect of taxes on the returns from working and saving is the marginal tax rate—that is, the tax paid per dollar of extra earnings or dollar of extra income from savings. Exhibits 4 through 6 present information about marginal tax rates, including the following points:

• The highest marginal income tax rate (the tax rate that applies to the top tax bracket) was as high as 70 percent as recently as 1980, although a lower maximum rate applied to earnings in that year. Since 1988, the highest marginal income tax rate has ranged from 28 percent to 39.6 percent.
• For a representative family of four with median income, the marginal tax rate on earnings (combining the rates for both income and payroll taxes) has remained at about 30 percent since the mid-1980s.

Provisions of the tax code can also affect economic activity by subsidizing certain types of spending. Revenues forgone because of certain special features of the tax code are known as tax expenditures. Tax expenditures have helped to accomplish various goals, but because they reduce the base to which tax rates apply, tax rates must be higher to collect the same amount of revenues that would be collected in the absence of those subsidies. Exhibits 7 through 10 present information about tax expenditures, including the following points:

• The two largest tax expenditures are the deduction of mortgage interest on owner-occupied residences and the exclusion of employers’ contributions for health care, health insurance premiums, and long-term care insurance premiums from the individual income tax. Each of those results in forgone revenues equal to about 9 percent of individual income tax revenues.
• There are significant corporate tax expenditures as well.

The Tax Burden and Who Bears It

The final set of charts beginning with Exhibit 11 shows the impact of federal taxes on various categories of households, which bear the economic cost of taxes that they pay directly as well as taxes paid by businesses. One measure of the tax burden is the average tax rate, which equals taxes paid as a share of income. Federal taxes are progressive, meaning that average federal tax rates generally rise with income. Specifically:

• In 2007, households in the bottom fifth, or quintile, of the income distribution paid about 4 percent of their income in federal taxes, while the middle quintile paid 14 percent, and the highest quintile paid 25 percent.
• The individual income tax has average tax rates that rise rapidly with income. Payroll taxes have average tax rates that vary little across most income groups but fall for the highest quintile because earnings above a certain threshold are not subject to the Social Security payroll tax and because earnings are a smaller portion of total income for that group. The average social insurance tax rate is higher than the average individual income tax rate for all income groups except the highest quintile.
• Between 1979 and 2007, the average tax rate for federal taxes declined for all income groups.
• The share of taxes paid by the top fifth of the population grew sharply between 1979 and 2007. Almost all of that growth can be attributed to an increase in that group’s share of before-tax income. In 2007, households in the highest quintile earned 55 percent of before-tax income and paid almost 70 percent of federal taxes; for all other quintiles, the share of federal taxes was less than the share of income.

Today I spoke to the National Tax Association in Chicago and earlier this week I spoke to the Society of Government Economists in Washington, D.C.  This week’s presentations are quite similar to those that I gave last month in Los Angeles and New York. (See my posts on October 27 and October 21.)  I highlighted aspects of my testimony to the Senate Budget Committee in late September, reviewing CBO’s recent analyses of the economic outlook and the potential impact on the economy of various fiscal policy options that CBO studied earlier in the year. I also discussed CBO’s estimates of the economic impact of extending some or all of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that are scheduled to expire at the end of the year.

This morning, CBO issued its Monthly Budget Review, which summarized the end-of-year budget results reported by the Treasury for fiscal year 2010. In that year, which ended on September 30, the federal government recorded a total budget deficit of $1.3 trillion, $122 billion less than the deficit incurred in 2009. The deficit fell as a share of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) from 10.0 percent in 2009 to 8.9 percent in 2010—the second-highest deficit as a share of GDP since 1945 and about four times the average deficit as a share of GDP recorded between 2005 and 2008.

The large deficits in 2009 and 2010 reflect a combination of factors: an imbalance between revenues and spending that predates the recent recession, sharply lower revenues and elevated spending associated with those economic conditions, and the costs of federal policies implemented in response to those conditions. Revenues in 2010 were 16 percent below the peak amount reached in fiscal year 2007 and only slightly above the amount collected in 2005. Total revenues in both 2009 and 2010 were 14.9 percent of GDP, the lowest share since 1950. In contrast, outlays in 2010 were 27 percent more than spending in 2007.

Receipts and Outlays
As a Percentage of GDP

Sources: Department of the Treasury; CBO

The deficit was smaller in 2010 than in 2009 because revenues increased and spending declined. Receipts in 2010 rose for the first time in three years, reaching $2,162 billion, up 3 percent from collections in 2009. Expenditures decreased by $64 billion (or 2 percent) from 2009 to 2010.

On the revenue side, corporate income tax receipts showed the largest gain in dollar terms from 2009 to 2010—$53 billion (or 38 percent). Despite the gain, those receipts were just over half as large as in 2007 and 37 percent below the amount collected in 2008. The gain in corporate income tax receipts can be attributed to higher taxable profits resulting from both improved economic conditions and the temporary lapse of provisions that allowed taxpayers to take higher depreciation charges in 2009. Receipts from the Federal Reserve also rose substantially, increasing by almost $42 billion to an amount more than double the 2009 receipts. The central bank’s increased profits resulted from an enlarged portfolio and a shift to riskier and thus higher-yielding investments.

Those gains in 2010 receipts were partially offset by declines in receipts from social insurance (payroll) taxes of $26 billion (or 3 percent) and individual income taxes of $17 billion (or 2 percent). Receipts during the first several months of the fiscal year were below those during the same period in 2009. But in the last five months of fiscal year 2010, collections of withheld and nonwithheld taxes, which were based on taxable incomes in 2010, were 4 percent higher than in the same period in 2009.

Spending related to the financial crisis dropped sharply in 2010. Net outlays recorded for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), federal deposit insurance, and Treasury payments to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were $367 billion lower in 2010 than in 2009. Conversely, spending associated with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)&emdash;the stimulus bill&emdash;rose by approximately $110 billion to a total of roughly $225 billion.

Outlays for defense rose by 4.7 percent in 2010, lower than the previous year’s increase of 7.1 percent and about half the average annual growth rate of 8.8 percent over the past decade. The 3.4 percent rise in spending for procurement was markedly lower than recent double-digit growth, and spending on research and development declined by 2.6 percent—the first drop since 1999. Nearly one-quarter of military spending in 2010 was associated with operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—about the same portion as in 2008 and 2009, CBO estimates.

Outlays for the three largest entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (not including spending from ARRA)—rose by 5.4 percent in 2010. That increase was smaller than the 7.0 percent average annual growth over the past five years. Nevertheless, Social Security outlays as a share of the economy grew for the fifth consecutive year, rising from 4.1 percent of GDP in 2006 to 4.8 percent of GDP in 2010. Spending for Medicare and Medicaid (excluding the effects of ARRA) represented 4.7 percent of GDP, compared with an annual average of 4.1 percent of GDP experienced over the past five years.

Payments for unemployment benefits were one-third greater in 2010 than in 2009. Those payments totaled $162 billion (or 1.1 percent of GDP), more than triple the amount paid in 2008. Spending for net interest on the public debt also increased to 1.6 percent of GDP, up from 1.4 percent of GDP in 2009. Spending on the wide variety of other federal programs accounted for about 30 percent of the budget and was equal to 7.2 percent of GDP, slightly more than spending in 2009 and the average over the past five years.

I am honored to be speaking today to “Town Hall Los Angeles,” which has been providing a public forum for discussion of important issues since 1937. My remarks highlight aspects of my testimony to the Senate Budget Committee a few weeks ago. (Sorry, Town Hall LA does not use slides, so there is nothing to accompany this summary.)

CBO and most private forecasters expect that the economic recovery will proceed at a modest pace during the next few years. In the forecast that we completed this summer, the unemployment rate remains above 8 percent until 2012. Two key factors influence that forecast. First, international experience suggests that recoveries from recessions that were spurred by financial crises tend to be slower than average. Following such a crisis, it takes time for consumers to rebuild their wealth, for financial institutions to restore their capital bases, and for nonfinancial firms to regain the confidence required to invest in new plant and equipment; all of those forces tend to restrain spending. Second, our projection is conditioned on current law, under which both the waning of fiscal stimulus and the scheduled increases in taxes (resulting from the expiration of previous tax cuts) will temporarily subtract from growth, especially in 2011.

Weak economic growth has serious social consequences. About 9½ percent of the labor force is officially unemployed, but many other people are underemployed or have become discouraged and left the labor force. The increase in unemployment is not uniform across demographic groups or regions; rather, the unemployment rate has risen disproportionately for less-educated workers, for men, and for people living in certain states. Moreover, the incidence of unemployment lasting longer than 26 weeks has been the highest by far in the past 60 years. CBO published an issue brief in April about the personal consequences of job losses.

Policymakers cannot reverse all of the effects of the housing and credit boom, the subsequent bust and financial crisis, and the deep recession. However, in CBO’s judgment, there are both monetary and fiscal policy options that, if applied at a sufficient scale, would increase output and employment during the next few years. In a report last January, we analyzed a diverse set of temporary policies and reported their two-year effects on the economy per dollar of budgetary cost, what one might call the “bang for the buck.” The overall effects of those policies would depend also on the scale at which they were implemented; making a significant difference in an economy with an annual output of nearly $15 trillion would involve a considerable budgetary cost.

In brief, CBO found the following: A temporary increase in aid to the unemployed would have the largest effect on the economy per dollar of budgetary cost. A temporary reduction in payroll taxes paid by employers would also have a large bang-for-the-buck, as it would both increase demand for goods and services and provide a direct incentive for additional hiring; this approach also could be scaled to a significant magnitude. Temporary expensing of business investments and providing aid to states would have smaller effects, and yet smaller effects would arise from a temporary increase in government spending on infrastructure or a temporary across-the-board reduction in income taxes.

However, there would be a price to pay for fiscal stimulus: Those same fiscal policy options would increase federal debt, which is already larger relative to the size of the economy than it has been in more than 50 years—and is headed higher. If policymakers wanted to achieve both stimulus and sustainability, a combination of policies would be required: changes in taxes and spending that would widen the deficit now but reduce it relative to baseline projections after a few years.

To illustrate this point, we analyzed both the short-term and longer-term effects of various options for extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, extending higher exemption amounts for the AMT, and reinstating the estate tax as it stood in 2009 (adjusted for inflation). As I reported in the recent testimony, permanently or temporarily extending all or part of the expiring income tax cuts would boost income and employment in the next few years relative to what would occur under current law. That would occur because, all else being equal, lower tax payments increase demand for goods and services and thereby boost economic activity. That increase in demand is crucial because we think that economic growth in the near term will be restrained by a shortfall in demand. A permanent extension of the tax cuts would provide a larger boost to income and employment in the next two years than would a temporary extension. In addition, an extension of all of the provisions would provide a larger boost than would an extension of all provisions except those applying only to high-income taxpayers.

But the effects of extending those tax cuts on the economy in the longer term would be very different from their effects during the next two years. The longer-term effects would be the net result of two competing forces: All else being equal, lower tax revenues increase budget deficits and thereby government borrowing, which reduces economic growth by crowding out investment. At the same time, lower tax rates boost growth by increasing people’s saving and work effort. Those effects on the supply of labor and capital are crucial because we think that economic growth over that longer horizon will be restrained by supply factors. For some of the options, our estimates of the net effect of these forces based on different models and assumptions span a broad range. But the averages of the estimates across different models and assumptions indicate that all four of the options we analyzed—permanently or temporarily extending all or part of the expiring income tax cuts—would probably reduce national income in 2020 relative to what would otherwise occur. Beyond 2020, the reductions in income from all four of the policy options would become larger—especially for the permanent extensions.

Similarly, permanent large increases in spending that were not accompanied by reductions in other spending or tax increases would also put federal debt on an unsustainable path. For example, if discretionary appropriations apart from those for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan increased at the rate of growth of nominal GDP, rather than increasing just with inflation as assumed in our baseline, debt held by the public would reach nearly 80 percent of GDP by 2020.

The federal government’s fiscal year 2010 has come to a close, and CBO estimates, in its latest Monthly Budget Review, that the federal budget deficit for the year was slightly less than $1.3 trillion, $125 billion less than the shortfall recorded in 2009. Relative to the size of the economy, the 2010 deficit was the second-highest shortfall—and 2009 the highest—since 1945. The 2010 deficit was equal to 8.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), CBO estimates, down from 10.0 percent in 2009 (based on the most current estimate of GDP). CBO’s deficit estimate is based on data from the Daily Treasury Statements and CBO’s projections; the Treasury Department will report the actual deficit for fiscal year 2010 later this month.

The estimated deficit is about $50 billion less than CBO projected in its August Budget and Economic Outlook. Outlays turned out to be lower and revenues higher than CBO anticipated.

Outlays

Outlays ended the year about 2 percent below those in 2009, CBO estimates. That decline resulted primarily from a net reduction in outlays for three items related to the financial crisis: the costs of the TARP ($262 billion lower than in 2009), payments to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ($51 billion lower), and federal deposit insurance ($55 billion lower). Excluding those three programs, spending rose by about 9 percent in 2010, somewhat faster than in recent years.

Payments for unemployment benefits rose by 34 percent in 2010 because of high unemployment and increased benefits provided by various laws, including the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Other ARRA provisions led to double-digit growth in spending for a number of programs—particularly the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, refundable tax credits, and certain education programs. In contrast, defense spending grew more slowly than in recent years, increasing by about 5 percent in 2010 after rising by an average of 8 percent annually from 2005 through 2009. Medicare and Social Security outlays rose by about 5 percent this year, somewhat less than in most recent years. The 9 percent increase in Medicaid outlays partly reflects a temporary increase in the federal share of Medicaid assistance authorized in ARRA; excluding ARRA-related expenditures, Medicaid outlays rose by about 6 percent.

Receipts

CBO estimates that total receipts rose by 3 percent in 2010, following declines in each of the prior two years. Growth in receipts of corporate income taxes and remittances from the Federal Reserve more than offset reduced collections of individual income and payroll taxes in 2010.

Corporate income tax receipts rose by $53 billion (or 39 percent) in 2010; improved economic conditions and the expiration of legislation that allowed taxpayers to take higher depreciation charges in 2009 has resulted in higher taxable profits in 2010. Receipts from the Federal Reserve increased by $42 billion this year, to more than double the amount received in 2009. The central bank’s increased profits resulted from an enlarged portfolio and a shift to riskier and thus higher-yielding investments in support of the housing market and the broader economy.

Those increases were partially offset by a drop in the total of individual income and payroll taxes, which were about $43 billion (or 2 percent) less than those receipts in 2009. That result occurred primarily because withheld income and payroll taxes declined by about $13 billion (or 1 percent), and nonwithheld receipts fell by about $35 billion (or 10 percent). In both instances, the declines occurred early in the fiscal year and were largely attributable to lower collections of tax liabilities incurred in 2009. Collections of income and payroll taxes in the past five months are 4 percent above the amounts collected during the same period in 2009.

The Monthly Budget Review was prepared by Elizabeth Cove Delisle and Daniel Hoople of CBO's Budget Analysis Division, and by Barbara Edwards and Joshua Shakin of our Tax Analysis Division.
 

I testified this morning to the Senate Budget Committee about the economic outlook and CBO’s analysis of the potential impact on the economy of various fiscal policy options. You can read a summary of my testimony (the full version, which is rather long, is also available), or you can glance at the slides I used, which are below.

Policymakers cannot reverse all of the effects of the housing and credit boom, the subsequent bust and financial crisis, and the deep recession. However, in CBO’s judgment, there are both monetary and fiscal policy options that, if applied at a sufficient scale, would increase output and employment during the next few years. But there would be a price to pay: Those same fiscal policy options would increase federal debt, which is already larger relative to the size of the economy than it has been in more than 50 years—and is headed higher. If policymakers wanted to achieve both stimulus and sustainability, a combination of policies would be required: changes in taxes and spending that would widen the deficit now but reduce it relative to baseline projections after a few years.

To assist policymakers in their decisions, CBO has quantified the effects of some alternative fiscal policy options. In a report last January, we analyzed a diverse set of temporary policies and reported their two-year effects on the economy per dollar of budgetary cost, what one might call the “bang for the buck.” The overall effects of those policies would depend also on the scale at which they were implemented; making a significant difference in an economy with an annual output of nearly $15 trillion would involve a considerable budgetary cost.

In brief, CBO found the following: A temporary increase in aid to the unemployed would have the largest effect on the economy per dollar of budgetary cost. A temporary reduction in payroll taxes paid by employers would also have a large bang-for-the-buck, as it would both increase demand for goods and services and provide a direct incentive for additional hiring. Temporary expensing of business investment and providing aid to states would have smaller effects, and yet smaller effects would arise from a temporary increase in infrastructure investment and a temporary across-the-board reduction in income taxes.

Today’s testimony went on to address the effects of another set of fiscal policy options. At the request of the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, we have now estimated the short-term and longer-term effects of extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, extending higher exemption amounts for the alternative minimum tax, and reinstating the estate tax as it stood in 2009 (adjusted for inflation). The methodology for this analysis was quite similar to the methodology that CBO follows in analyzing the President’s budget each spring; we used several different models and made different assumptions about people’s behavior.

We examined four alternative approaches to extending the tax cuts: a “full permanent extension” that would extend all of the provisions permanently; a “partial permanent extension” that would extend permanently all of the provisions except those applying only to high-income taxpayers; a “full extension through 2012” that would extend all provisions but only through 2012; and a “partial extension through 2012” that would extend through 2012 all provisions except those applying only to high-income taxpayers. As shown in the following figure, all four of the options would raise national income, output, and employment during the next two years, relative to what would occur under current law. That would occur because, all else being equal, lower tax payments increase demand for goods and services and thereby boost economic activity.

Ranges of Effects of Four Tax Policy Options on Real GNP in 2011 and 2012

But the effects of those policy options on the economy in the longer term would be very different from their effects during the next two years. The averages of the estimates across different models and assumptions indicate that all four of the options would probably reduce income relative to what would otherwise occur in 2020 (see the figure below). Those effects are largely the net result of two competing forces: All else being equal, lower tax revenues increase budget deficits and thereby government borrowing, which reduces economic growth by crowding out investment. At the same time, lower tax rates boost growth by increasing people’s saving and work effort.

Effects of Four Tax Policy Options on Real GNP in 2020

Beyond 2020, and again relative to what would occur under current law, the reductions in income from all four of the policy options would become larger. Either a full or a partial extension of the tax cuts through 2012 would reduce income by much less than would a full or partial permanent extension.

In sum, and as CBO has reported before: Permanently or temporarily extending all or part of the expiring income tax cuts would boost income and employment in the next few years relative to what would occur under current law. However, even a temporary extension would add to federal debt and reduce future income if it was not accompanied by other changes in policy. A permanent extension of all of those tax cuts without future increases in taxes or reductions in federal spending would roughly double the projected budget deficit in 2020; a permanent extension of those cuts except for certain provisions that would apply only to high-income taxpayers would increase the budget deficit by roughly three-quarters to four-fifths as much. As a result, if policymakers then wanted to balance the budget in 2020, the required increases in taxes or reductions in spending would amount to a substantial share of the budget—and without significant changes of that sort, federal debt would be on an unsustainable path that would ultimately reduce national income. Similarly, even temporary increases in government spending would add to federal debt and reduce future income, and permanent large increases in spending that were not accompanied by other spending reductions or tax increases would put federal debt on an unsustainable path. Compared with the options examined here for extending the expiring tax cuts, various other options for temporarily reducing taxes or increasing government spending would provide a bigger boost to the economy per dollar of cost to the federal government.

I’m speaking this afternoon to the Washington Policy Seminar sponsored by the Macroeconomic Advisers forecasting firm.  My presentation draws on several reports that CBO has released over the course of this year and emphasizes these points:

• CBO and most private forecasters expect that the economic recovery will proceed at a modest pace during the next few years. For example, in the forecast that we completed in early July, the unemployment rate remains above 8 percent until 2012. In addition, the economic data released since we finished that forecast have been weaker than we had expected, so if we were to construct a new forecast today, we would project slightly slower growth in the near term.
• Weak economic growth has serious social consequences. About 9½ percent of the labor force is officially unemployed, but many other people are underemployed or have left the labor force. The increase in unemployment is not uniform across demographic groups or regions, with larger run-ups for less-educated workers, men, and people living in certain states. The incidence of unemployment lasting longer than 26 weeks has been the highest by far in the past 60 years. As discussed in our April issue brief, the short-term and long-term impact on people of losing a job during a recession can be very significant.
• Some observers have argued that there is not much that policymakers can do about the weakness of the recovery. That is not our view at CBO. Although there are no magic cures, we do think there are both monetary and fiscal policy options that, if applied at a sufficient scale, would increase output and employment during the next few years (but not overnight). Such options would have costs though—in particular, expansionary fiscal policy would increase federal budget deficits and debt relative to current baseline projections, which are already quite worrisome.
• One key question I’ve been asked in the debate about fiscal policy: What sorts of fiscal policies would actually encourage greater economic activity and more employment? Fiscal policy can affect behavior through several channels: by changing direct demand for goods and services, changing people’s current and/or expected income, changing the payoff from extra work effort and saving, changing the cost of investment, and so on. Predicting the effects of particular policies is difficult, and estimates are quite uncertain.
• In January of this year, we published a study titled Policies for Increasing Economic Growth and Employment in 2010 and 2011. We studied temporary policy changes to be enacted in early 2010, because most observers were interested in the question of how to provide a short-term boost to the economy without significantly worsening the medium- and long-term budget situation. In most cases, permanent changes would generate larger short-term stimulus but would have substantially larger medium- and long-term budget and economic costs. We estimated the “bang for the buck” of different policies; of course, the effect on the economy would also depend on the scale of the policies. This graph summarizes our estimates:

Cumulative Effects of Policy Options on Employment in 2010 and 2011, Range of Low to High Estimates

• The other key question I’ve been asked: How can short-term fiscal stimulus be reconciled with the imperative—and it is a critical imperative—to put fiscal policy on a sustainable medium-term and long-term path? As I said to the Fiscal Commission at the end of June, there is no intrinsic contradiction between providing additional fiscal stimulus today, while the unemployment rate is high and many factories and offices are underused, and imposing fiscal restraint several years from now, when output and employment will probably be close to their potential.
• If taxes were cut or government spending were increased permanently that would worsen the already worrisome fiscal outlook, as shown in the graph below.  Even if changes were temporary, the additional debt accumulated during that temporary period would weigh on the budget and the economy in the future. Achieving both stimulus and sustainability would require a combination of policies. If policymakers wanted to avoid worsening the large medium-term and long-term imbalance between federal spending and revenue, any policies that widened budget deficits in the near-term would need to be accompanied by specific policies to reduce spending or increase revenue over time.

Rising Burden of Federal Debt Held by the Public

• In summary, the economic recovery will probably proceed at a modest pace—leaving total output well below its sustainable level, and the unemployment rate well above its sustainable level, for a number of years. In CBO’s judgment, the available monetary and fiscal tools, if applied at sufficient scale, would improve economic conditions during the next few years—though with costs and risks in the medium and long term. Policymakers need to address those trade-offs.
   

CBO estimates, in its annual summer update of the budget and economic outlook, that the federal budget deficit for 2010 will exceed $1.3 trillion—$71 billion below last year’s total and $27 billion lower than the amount that CBO projected in March 2010 when it issued its previous estimate. Relative to the size of the economy, this year’s deficit is expected to be the second largest shortfall in the past 65 years: At 9.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), it is exceeded only by last year’s deficit of 9.9 percent of GDP. As was the case last year, this year’s deficit is attributable in large part to a combination of weak revenues and elevated spending associated with the economic downturn and the policies implemented in response to it.

This report presents CBO’s updated budget and economic projections spanning the 2010–2020 period. Those projections reflect the assumption that current laws affecting the budget will remain unchanged—and thus the projections serve as a neutral benchmark that lawmakers can use to assess the potential effects of policy decisions. As such, CBO assumes that tax reductions enacted earlier in this decade that are currently set to expire at the end of this year do so as scheduled; it also assumes that no new legislation aimed at keeping the alternative minimum tax (AMT) from affecting many more taxpayers is enacted. In addition, CBO assumes that the measures enacted in the past two years to provide fiscal stimulus to the weakened economy will expire as currently scheduled and that future annual appropriations will be kept constant in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. Under those assumptions, the federal budget deficit would decline substantially over the next two years—to 4.2 percent of GDP in 2012—and, consequently, the budget would provide much less support to the economy than has been the case for the past two years.

According to CBO’s projections, the recovery from the economic downturn will continue at a modest pace during the next few years. Growth in the nation’s output since the middle of calendar year 2009 has been anemic in comparison with that of previous recoveries following deep recessions, and the unemployment rate has remained quite high, averaging 9.7 percent in the first half of this year. Such weak growth is typical in the aftermath of a financial crisis. The considerable number of vacant houses and underused factories and offices will be a continuing drag on residential construction and business investment, and slow income growth as well as lost wealth will restrain consumer spending.

All of those forces, along with the waning of federal fiscal support, will tend to restrain spending by individuals and businesses—and, therefore, economic growth—during the recovery. CBO projects that the economy will grow by only 2.0 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010 to the fourth quarter of 2011; even with faster growth in subsequent years, the unemployment rate will not fall to around 5 percent until 2014.

In CBO’s current-law projections, once the economy has recovered, the federal budget deficit amounts to between 2.5 percent and 3.0 percent of GDP from 2014 to 2020. Projected deficits total $6.2 trillion for the 10 years starting in 2011, raising federal debt held by the public to more than 69 percent by 2020, almost double the 36 percent of GDP observed at the end of 2007.

Those projections, which are similar in many respects to the ones that CBO prepared in March, reflect assumptions about spending and revenues that may significantly underestimate actual deficits. Because the projections presume no changes in current tax laws, they result in estimates of revenues that, as a percentage of GDP, would be quite high by historical standards. Because of the assumption that future annual appropriations are held constant in real terms, the projections yield estimates of discretionary spending relative to GDP that would be low by historical standards. Of course, many other outcomes are possible. If, for example, the tax reductions enacted earlier in the decade were continued, the AMT was indexed for inflation, and future annual appropriations remained the share of GDP that they are this year, the deficit in 2020 would equal about 8 percent of GDP, and debt held by the public would total nearly 100 percent of GDP.

A different fiscal policy would also yield different economic outcomes. For example, CBO estimates that under an alternative fiscal path similar to the one mentioned above, real growth of GDP in 2011 would be 0.6 to 1.7 percentage points higher than it is in the baseline forecast, and the unemployment rate at the end of 2011 would be 0.3 to 0.8 percentage points lower. However, later in the coming decade, real GDP would fall below the level in CBO’s baseline because the larger budget deficits would reduce investment in productive capital.

Beyond the 10-year budget window, the nation will face daunting long-term fiscal challenges posed by rising costs for health care and the aging of the population. Continued large deficits and the resulting increases in federal debt over time would reduce long-term economic growth. Putting the nation on a sustainable fiscal course will require policymakers to restrain the growth of spending substantially, raise revenues significantly above their average percentage of GDP of the past 40 years, or adopt some combination of those approaches.
 

Yesterday CBO released estimates of average federal tax rates—households’ federal tax liability divided by their income—in 2007 for households with various amounts of income.  For each income category, the report also presents estimates of average before-tax and after-tax household income; the number of households; and that category’s share of taxes and income. A page on our website, Average Federal Taxes by Income Group, includes CBO’s estimates of average federal tax rates going back to 1979, as well as other information and publications on household income and taxes. 

CBO’s most recent analysis indicates that:

• On average, in 2007 households paid federal taxes, either directly or indirectly, totaling about 20 percent of their income. (That percentage includes corporate income taxes and employers’ share of payroll taxes, which are passed on to households in various ways.) Individual income taxes, the largest component, were 9.3 percent of household income. Payroll taxes for social insurance programs were the next largest source, with an average tax rate of 7.4 percent. Corporate income taxes and excise taxes were smaller, with average tax rates of 3.0 percent and 0.6 percent.
• The overall federal tax system is progressive—that is, average tax rates generally rise with income. Households in the bottom quintile (fifth) of the income distribution paid 4 percent of their income in federal taxes, while the middle quintile paid 14 percent, and the highest quintile paid 25 percent. Average rates continued to rise within the top quintile, with the top 1 percent facing an average rate of close to 30 percent.
• Higher-income groups earn a disproportionate share of pretax income and pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes.  In 2007, the highest quintile earned 56 percent of pretax income and paid 69 percent of federal taxes, while the top 1 percent of households earned 19 percent of income and paid 28 percent of taxes. In all other quintiles, the share of federal taxes was less than the income share. The bottom quintile earned 4 percent of income and paid less than 1 percent of taxes, while the middle quintile earned 13 percent of income and paid 9 percent of taxes.
• Average tax rates in 2007 changed only slightly compared with their levels in 2006. There were no significant changes in the tax law between those years, and changes in the distribution of incomes were not enough to cause large movements in average rates.

This publication was prepared by Ed Harris of CBO’s Tax Analysis Division.