Choices for federal spending and taxes

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About the lecture If we maintain our current spending and tax policies, the federal budget deficit will be so large that debt will continue to rise much faster than GDP. That cannot go on indefinitely. We will need at least to stabilize debt as a share of GDP, and we may decide to push debt back down toward the share of GDP it represented during the past several decades. Putting the federal budget on a sustainable path of that sort cannot be achieved by returning to the policies of the past. Instead, we will need to make choices for federal spending and taxes that lead to fundamentally different policies than we have had in the past.

From the speaker's bio Doug Elmendorf is the eighth director of the Congressional Budget Office. Before he came to CBO in January 2009, he was a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. As the Edward M. Bernstein Scholar, he served as co-editor of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity and the director of the Hamilton Project, an initiative to promote broadly shared economic growth. Doug Elmendorf was previously an assistant professor at Harvard University, a principal analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, a senior economist at the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, and an assistant director of the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board. In those positions, he worked on budget policy, Social Security, Medicare, national health care reform, financial markets, macroeconomic analysis and forecasting, and other topics. He earned his PhD and AM in economics from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation graduate fellow, and his AB summa cum laude from Princeton University. Co-sponsored by the University of Michigan Department of Economics

• Brookings
• Doug Elmendorf
• Brookings Institution