[classicman]

Congressional Budget Office Predicts Gloomy US Economy

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) releases its 10-year Budget and Economic Outlook during the first month of every year. There was no exception in 2012, as the CBO released its outlook on Jan. 31, followed by the testimony of economist Douglas W. Elmendorf, director at the CBO, to the Committee on the Budget in the U.S. Senate on Feb. 2.

Elmendorf gave a rather gloomy forecast on the U.S. economy, suggesting that the United States’s unprecedented high budget deficit is closely connected to the U.S. economic health and will not improve significantly until the economy rebounds.

“How much and how quickly the deficit declines will depend in part on how well the economy does over the next few years. Probably more critical, though, will be the fiscal policy choices made by lawmakers,” Elmendorf testified.

Statisticians suggest that depending on the statistics that were used, the projected outcome could differ significantly. Concerning the deficit, the numbers provided to the public are net figures and do not include the gross federal debt.

“The sad fact is that statistics are ridiculously easy to manipulate. … There are literally hundreds of ways to manipulate statistics,” according to an article about statistical manipulation on the Effective Meetings website.

“The pace of the economic recovery has been slow since the recession ended in June 2009, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects that, under current laws governing taxes and spending, the economy will continue to grow at a sluggish pace over the next two years,” according to the CBO report.

The U.S. economic recovery will continue to be sluggish and is predicted not to improve significantly until 2018.

The CBO predicts that the unemployment rate will not subside significantly during this and next year, hovering around 8 percent and then 7 percent for the years 2014 and 2015.

Link

“The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014. The official unemployment rate excludes those individuals who would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been about 15 percent. Compounding the problem of high unemployment, the share of unemployed people looking for work for more than six months—referred to as the long-term unemployed—topped 40 percent in December 2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began to be collected; it has remained above that level ever since.”

Are you seeing "recovery" where you are? Maybe its just me and my situation, but I'm more inclined to agree with the CBO rather than the administration.