hours claimed in the lodestar are simply -- i don't mean the kind of hours were you me with your partner and you both bill. and talking about real cheating. >> fascinating, and we can talk about it all might mumble we're running short on time. .. there are a lot of good things in judges making sure we hold

judges accountable is important. >> all good ideas and the one idea that is not feasible unfortunately is too cloned ted frank but he is an american treasure. for those of you out there in a national television audience how did they get in touch with you ted if they want to send you a case or send you a check wax. >> well class-action fairness .org i think and class-action fairness@gmail.com. >> those of you out here if you got a bad notice in the mail where you just think this is a problem and ted needs more than for lawyers to fight all the cases out there give him some help. let's thank our panel wittman and lester brickman. [applause] those of you in the room who want cle credit sign out and turn in your evaluation form. thanks.

[inaudible conversations] >> at the creation museum believes space upon the bible but we also teach people the difference between believes and what one can observe and experiment with and i believe we are teaching people to think

critically and in right terms about science. i believe it's the creationists that should be educated -- educating the kids out there because we are teaching them the right way to thing. we have met our origins and has dark designer based on the bible but i'm challenging evolution is to be upfront about the difference here. i encourage you to explain to us why, why we should accept your word for it that natural law changed just 4000 years ago completely and there is no record of it. you know there are pyramids that are older than not. there are human populations that are far older than that with traditions that go back farther than that and it's just not reasonable to me that everything changed 4000 years ago and by everything i mean species, the surface of the earth, the stars in the sky and the relationsrelations hip of all the other living things on earth to humans.

it's just not reasonable to me that everything changed like that.

a report from the congressional budget office found that increasing the minimum wage would benefit about steam million workers and cost a half a million jobs for other people. at a breakfast focus did -- hosted by the "christian science monitor" the head of the cbo assessed about the numbers. >> you think the letter sent by economists said that increases in the minimum wage have little to no negative effect on the unemployment of minimum wage workers. you seem to think that your report kind of lined up with that assessment by the economist. do you think that the loss of 500,000 jobs would equal little to no negative impact on unemployment? >> i'm not going to speak directly to what leader pelosi has said. i can only speak about our analysis. as i said before our analysis is quite consistent with the latest thinking by economists.

what i noted about this letter and a survey that i referred to is those economists don't put numbers to their words so it's hard to know exactly what people meant by little to no effect. by noticeably harder to find a job. our estimates for a 9-dollar minimum wage which i said is the increase that is the most consistent that economists have studied in the past in terms of how far into wage distribution and cuts. our analysis of that proposal suggests the decline in employment would be between 1.5, 2.5% and a slight increase and they think a 2.5% decline too many people would he a small decline or a little decline in the slight increase would be no effect roughly. so i don't think one can tell from this statement in this letter ,-com,-com ma one can't be sure exactly how economists

would take our results and that's not a representative sampling of economist so i don't think you can tell anything from that particular wording that is different from what we have done nor can you tell does that wording proved economists would be agreeable with what we have done. what we have done ourselves is to do a very careful reading of literature and we put some weight on a wide range of results. national economies to put more weight on certain studies then others will reach a different conclusion and some economists undoubtedly will find our estimates to be larger than they would pick take themselves and other would find their estimates of employment effects to be smaller than they would pick them selves. our job is to provide a balanced reading and we have done that. >> i'm sorry, go ahead. sneh i'm wondering if there is, if you could put a percentage due at the chances that the impact on unemployment in the 10-ton range could be lower, say

100,000. >> arrangement provided for an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 is from a slight decrease in employment two -1 million workers and we save that we constructed this range to capture as best we can judge two-thirds of the distribution of possible outcomes so that teams there is in our judgment a one sixth chance that the effects of raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would be a bigger decline in unemployment and a one sixth chance at raising it would not reduce employment or decrease employment. a two-thirds chance with a slight decrease in the decrease in the million workers. >> did this surprise you at all or was this something you expected ,-com,-com ma this reaction? >> much of the work we do there are a range of reactions and we take great pains in doing

analyses to read widely ahead of time and to consult with people with a wide range of views. if you look at the people we list at the end and we spoke about this work, you will see from knowing their own work that day came to this question with a very different set of view of what would happen. we understand that there will be a range of reactions among professionals and analysts outside the cbo and among policymakers and commentators outside of cbo. it doesn't surprise us nor does it have any effect on the work that we do.

>> host: back at our table michael hirsh of the "national journal" chief correspondent to talk about the stimulus bill 5 years later. the white house released a report over the weekend and looking at the impact of it. what did they say the impact of the stimulus has been? >> guest: not surprisingly there were extremely positive both in terms of how many jobs it either created or saved. they say it was 1.6 million jobs a year from the start of mid-2011 i believe and they also said it added two to 3% growth to gdp. somewhat controversially they claimed it didn't add much to the long-term debt because it

added growth of the economy so it was you know quite a rosy picture from what has been from the start in what became particularly in the 2012 presidential campaign a real lightning rod of controversy. >> host: what did they promise when the stimulus bill was signed into law as far as jobs saved and are these claims that the white house is making, are the true? >> guest: well, they are in line with most estimates. the vast majority of economists, there was a survey by the chicago school of business in 2012 i believe it was, which came out showing 80% of the economists surveyed said there were clearly growth benefits and job benefits to the stimulus package so for several years now since the stimulus there has been a distinct minority mainly

aligned with you know the conservative wing of the republican party who have denied there have been any benefits. i think the real issue is just how much impact it really had. the congressional budget office which is considered nonpartisan for example in 2012 came out with a study showing a wide range of growth benefits. they concluded that there were growth benefits and doug elmendorf ahead of the cbo said in testimony that there were clear benefits but the ranges are extremely, i mean 200,001.1 million jobs for example so it's not clear. there is no direct cause and effect necessary. you have a whole slew of different kinds of programs put into place as the economy really began to descend rapidly in the late fall of 2008. we were looking at an 8% contraction to the economy and the financial disaster unlike

any since the great depression which was the original reason for the stimulus. so you had in addition to that other fiscal programs. you have a huge revolutionary programs put in place by the federal reserve chairman ben bernanke that had never been done before. it's a little bit difficult to unscramble that omelette if you will and say what did what interest of growth in economy. >> host: here's what what the house speaker had to say john boehner about the stimulus bill. the stimulus has turned out to be a classic case of big promises and expending with little results. five years and billions of dollars later millions of families are still asking where all the jobs? more americans are living at or below the poverty line. medium household incomes are down. a new normal is slow growth has set in with most now saying the worst is yet to come. >> guest: saying the worst is yet to come, i don't necessarily think that is justified. most of what they nurse says is

correct. we are still at even with decline in unemployment which has been fairly rapid in recent quarters. you are still at 6.7% which some economists are suggesting could be a new normal for an economy that pre-crash was a something like 4.5% unemployment. so that is an unsettling bit of news. worst yet to come? the u.s. is currently the best performing economy in the world if one excludes china which its own growth has slowed down considerably. and so there is some element of self congratulation going on here by the obama evisceration. we saw it recently when ben bernanke left as federal reserve chairman and replaced by janet yellen. there was a lot of back patting going on and i think most economists would agree that we averted what could very easily have been another great depression.

but what's interesting to me about all this criticism is that among many economists the real issue is not so much to the stimulus work but was it enough? many economists argue that in fact it just was not nearly enough given the level of the catastrophe and one reason you didn't have more of a knockdown effect in terms of job growth was as large as it was and it was historicahistorica lly large it needed to be much larger. >> host: vice president joe biden expected to make that argument today traveling to illinois to call for more infrastructure spending and marked the five-year anniversary of the stimulus bill. >> guest: yeah and i've had former administration officials and i spoke for example with jared bernstein -- bernstein and asked him what they did wrong on the stimulus and one of the things he said was he didn't sell a quite

right. i think that given the depth of the disaster that the economy was headed into rather than being sold as a one-off cure should have been sold as the first step in what probably needed to be a series of stimulus programs. and instead what you had after the passage of the stimulus particularly in the first year or so a lot of too optimistic talk about new green shoots growing in the economy and of course for a friday of reasons not the least of which was problems in europe and the eurozone problems. we did not seemed those green shoots for a long time in unemployment continued to climb. so i think that gave a lot of momentum and impetus to the republican narrative that the stimulus just wasn't working. >> host: peter you're up first in littleton colorado a republican caller talking about the stimulus five years later. what do you think? >> caller: you are generous.

you think the american media has failed the public is deliberatdeliberat ely looking the other way on the scientific evidence proving that building seven was brought down? >> host: peter that is not our topic today. we have taken those questions from groups like yours calling into question the investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks but that is not our topic today so we are moving on. henry and oak ridge tennessee democratic caller. hi henry. >> caller: i think he is wrong about was saying about 2010. once they got in office look what they did. [inaudible] the economy is getting better. we have 6.6% now and just a

couple years ago or so. >> guest: that is the main democratic counterpoint in this debate is that unfortunately the stimulus was limited and when spending slowed down when the funding ran out in fact we began talking about austerity and programs like this sequester, that really slowed the recovery and you know we are in debt or shape now if the stimulus would have been longer-lasting rather than the 67-point unemployment which is still too high. >> host: president obama expected to ask for more infrastructure spending in his budget when that is released. senator ted cruise tweeted this out about the five-year anniversary of the simas bill saying five years and it looks like president obama's stimulus did actually create jobs. unfortunately they are all at the irs and the nsa. if the president calls for more infrastructure spending as we are marking the five-year

anniversary of the stimulus bill, politically how is that achievable? >> sadly it's not that achievable. ted cruz's to be it's fair to say in a clinical and ideological play to the republican base, it's not really about the economics of the situation. if you talk to a number of republican governors around the country they all read lee agreed there's a huge need for infrastructure investment. indeed this is a traditional republican idea going back at least to eisenhower and the national interstate highway system and indeed as far back as the 19th century but right now with the polarized political environment today you really cannot talk about government

spending on the republican side and in fact this was something that affected the original debate over the stimulus. it ended up in a compromise where the administration had tim create a lot more tax cuts as part of the 800 william odd stimulus package than it really wanted to. it really wants to do a lot more infrastructure spending. >> host: the white house reportage on monday shows the breakdown of how the funds were allocated. 296 alien for entitlement and other programs 479 alien for contract grants. marco rubio pointed this out. the stimulus money would have been enough to cancel personal taxes for a whole year. now that's stimulus. democrat tweets in this i don't show it little to show to have avoided a second great depression. had it republicans not interfered the economy would be booming. what do you think wayne?

>> caller: just a question. why aren't we in a position right out of the box where president obama gets out of office to give stimulus to states that are in a shovel-ready position? i believe that most of the funds went to each state independently. >> host: let's talk about that. >> guest: i think economically there were some real legitimate legitimate -- and the way this was designed and one was the issue of tax cuts. with the demands of down in the economy in recession where those tax cuts going to go to spending or saving. probably saving and that was a problem so the tax cuts in that environment by might not have been the best and the other issue is the number of so-called shovel-ready projects, things that immediately create jobs as far as being long-term investment and i think one of the problems the administration created for itself was a sort of

melding the president's campaign promise, promises about investment in green energy and green technology to graphs that into what was supposed to be a stimulus package so you did not get as much media in job growth had you funneled this money at job growth for projects or closer to being ready to go in the states and that is one reason why because it was such an odd-looking political compromise the stimulus may not have been ideally designed to get the economy out of the horrible trench that it was in. >> host: one caller mentioned the unemployment rate previously announced today. february 2001 a cover act was signed it was a .3%. the current unemployment rate is 6.6%. are those toothache is related? >> guest: yeah well the economy was deeply in recession and continued to be through the

summer of 2009 when the unemployment rate climbed to over 10% before it started to climb. if you measure the decline from say just over 10% to 6.7% today clearly you have signs of recovery in 10 consecutive quarters of recovery which the white house is pointing to. the question is you know how much of that is directly related to the stimulus versus other programs? quite frankly this other fiscal program was in some respects dwarfed by some of the things the federal reserve did in terms of exploding its balance sheet by trillions of dollars in the quantitative easing program so again i think economists for decades to come are going to be hashing over these measures and to some degree rewriting economics based on this. you can see a lot of ph.d.s

born you know and bread over studies of what happened during this period and parsing out how much the stimulus had to do with other programs so we are very much in the early stages if you will of a rough draft of history. >> host: much like an bernanke's ph.d. on the recession. mike stone tweets in this. unemployment went down because of the work was declining not because of new jobs. >> guest: well that is a factor. long-term unemployment historically over the last several years although it is slightly lower as a percentage of the unemployment rate has been a huge problem in this economy and that is a lot of people, it's not just any particular ethnic group but a lot of people who just drop out of the workforce and say after six months are defined as long-term unemployed and you have a lot of other people who

simply stopped looking and that is a problem. there's no question about it. >> host: ron tweets in, can you imagine how well-off we would have been if obama had an double down on obama karen spent on infrastructure. bad choices. charlie in new york republican caller you are next. >> caller: yes, good morning. i must say this is the perfect guest for the washington journal the mecca of the low information voter. there are 92 million americans not working. that makes the real unemployment rate 37.2%, not 6.6%, 37.2. 6% of the stimulus money went to shovel-ready jobs. the rest was a slush fund for the unions and obama's campaign on klehr's and mr. hersh let me end with this. your industry is committing

suicide. you are ignoring obama's corruption, his scandal, his ineptitude. do you think people don't see at? do you think there is no alternative media? >> host: charlie can i ask you to go to "national journal".com and you read their reporting? >> no, this is the only liberal media, c-span is the only liberal media i watch. >> host: than charlie how can you make that claim about "national journal"? >> caller: i'm talking about the mainstream media. didn't you hear him? are sitting right next to the man. he said unemployment is 6.6%. charlie we will have them respond to your numbers. >> guest: the official numbers the bureau of labor statistics puts out. he is right, there are many

disputes over what the actual unemployment rate is. i have not heard 37% trade that's a little high but some experts and economists have argued it could be as high as 16 to 18% depending on who you count. that is the question, how many people do you count. as i said earlier a very serious long-term problem is people who are dropping out of the workforce. >> host: what about the debt as well? what has been the impact? >> guest: the debt is all -- actually somewhat stabilized compared the last few years when it seemed to be shooting up in an alarming rate. it's now about 70% of gdp and there has been a debate in economics over how high the debt and get a ford starts to drag on economic growth. there was a paper that came out in 2010 by two eminent economist

ken rogoff and reinhardt who suggested high debt was a drag on growth but there was this suggestion that the numbers they put out according to the international monetary fund if i recall correct you have to get pretty far over 90% of debt-to-gdp before it starts hurting a drag on economic growth so the point is i think where we are with the debt right now which hasn't slowed down in part because of spending cuts by congress, you are not at that dangerous level where the debt level seriously restricts. >> host: michael hurst is the chief correspondent for "national journal." if you go to "national journal".com you can find supporting there. he was the senior editor at "newsweek" and wrote a weekly column were "newsweek" as well the world from washington. we will go to michael next in houston texas the democratic caller. hi michael.

>> caller: hi, good morning. i understand you were looking at the five years of the stimulus package but in the overall picture we have to look back and remember this is the second stimulus package. the set -- the first one under president bush targeted banks and financial institutions like aig with no mechanism of paying that money back. >> host: are you talking about tarp michael? >> guest: yeah. the first stimulus package under president bush they had no mechanism of paying that money back. they didn't put it in there. also when president bush came into office we lost millions of jobs so then we have a collapse in president obama came in with the second stimulus package yeah we were getting jobs but that was targeted on other

institutions and other financial networks. and also with the shovel-ready jobs they had to be accountable for that money. it was up to the states individually to say you have this construction company and you have all these people that have the wherewithal and the influence within the states to do this construction jobs so we had the shovel-ready jobs that were put on the back werner because of our economics and the same people came in as they did before. that is why so many states said i don't want the money because you had to be accountable. >> host: okay michael in houston texas. >> guest: there was an issue of the tarp he allowed which wasn't a stimulus. it was really a way of saving wall street from complete

collapse. there was some stimulus by the bush of administration toward the end before obama came into office. i think again it gets back to parsing after-the-fact what could have been done more optimally with this giant 800 million dollar plus stimulus and the number of projects that were sort of ready for investment and ready to create jobs. i think it's fair to say that they are not always that easy defined and some of the states did resist. >> host: on that point matt smith tweets in if you want to guarantee the stimulus will be spent with lee, give the money to the poor. they have the highest propensity to spend. jeff in fargo north dakota independent caller. good morning. >> caller: good morning.

what really happened in this country was the federal reserve act of 1913 on jekyll island. people in this country don't know that the offshore families on the federal reserve and the repeal of the glass-steagall act with investment bankers in the regular bankers, that's the second thing. i think the people in this country are actually waking up finally. i just hope and pray that we can try to save this great nation and you guys both know that i'm right. a lot of people don't know the federal reserve is owned by offshore at -- >> host: jeff what is the evidence of that? >> guest: >> caller: whited three senators at 2:00 in the morning steel hour -- at 2:00 in the morning. >> host: michael hirsh can you

explain a little? >> guest: it's conspiracy theorizing. there was a book that was about to suppose the dark and shady workings of the cbo. there are some substantial subsections of the population that see this nefarious and in fact as i indicated earlier i think that the federal reserve under bernanke over the past eight years and particularly the past five or six years since the crisis has done an amazing job of preventing what could've been another depression. on the caller's other points i declined to comment at this point. >> host: my lindbergh says michael efforts some claimed the stimulus increase gdp from 8%

two plus 2% and a net gain of 10%. is that true? >> guest: well what we know is that the economy was in the fall of 2008, and when obama was taking office just after the election the economy was contracting during that quarter by about 8%. and of course it took a long time, a few years before it caught up to the two to 3% growth we are seeing now so historically yes. we have reversed that decline but of course the 8% drop was during the very short period of the recession. >> host: we will go to jack in saint charles, missouri republican caller. good morning jack create. >> caller: good morning. thanks for taking my call. i would suggest that the stimulus was no stimulus. you can't argue her way to prosperity.

a stimulus would be if you grandpa gave you a bunch of money to start a business and helped to get going. you can't borrow money to stimulate yourself. >> host: michael hirsh. >> guest: we should make the point that underlying this debate that has been going on for the past week over the stimulus and it's success or lack of success is really an ideological divide here. it goes back to questions about keynesian economics. john maynard keynes in the aftermath of the great depression was the one you propose what he called counter-cyclical spending, stimulus programs to bring the economy out of a recession art russian at a time when private investment is not there in the government needs to invest and that's the basic idea and still is the basic idea. you had a whole countervailing point of view which culminated

in ronald reagan and friedman was one of the leading champions of the view that stimulus spending never works. you can't stimulate an economy and accumulate debt to do that. that is really what was lying underneath this so when you hear people like ted cruz or marco rubio saying that it was a complete failure reflecting that huge debate going on for decades. >> host: stephanie and highland california, democratic caller. >> caller: good morning. one thing i want to say is i can't believe five years later we are still looking at the stimulus. when there was tarp and when there were tax cuts that weren't paid for it and the wars that weren't paid for and there was the pharmaceutical bill or whatever that wasn't paid for and they're looking at the stimulus bill. i just can't believe it and we remember and know that we have the representatives holding the pursestrings.

there's nothing we can do them as the house passes it so i just can't believe that and for all those people who are beating obama over the head with everything they can find i can't believe they don't remember that our economy was going over a cliff. you voted for bush so you can't complain about obama. thank you and have a nice day. >> guest: there is useful perspective and what she says. it is true that obama inherited a disastrous economy from george w. bush and if you speak to many on the far right, the tea party movement, many of them will say that the movement began really under george w. bush. huge spending and she referred to the pharmaceutical plan, the spending on drugs for medicare. you had obviously two wars and tax cuts usually pay for wars

with tax increases. there were huge deficits and a lot of anger in the heartland among the conservative a's because they say the bush administration was portraying this idea of small government. now obama i think didn't fully realize that he had a train heading his way in terms of this rising movement of pro-small government movement so when he did the stimulus with obamacare is i think he took most of the blame. as the caller indicated i think it's fair to look back over the whole past decade and say this is an accumulation of large government programs. >> host: american hero says the problem of spending does not help anything. production helps economy. james, independent caller. >> caller: hi. >> host: good morning.

>> caller: i guess you have touched on everything i had questions about so you might want to delineate what the stimulus was actually used for but i might want to point out that we have one economy and one bunch of government bailouts and money spending that has been in the trillions so the real problem seems still to be the bailout portion of this and not the stimulus. >> guest: it's again a very legitimate debate around the same time or i should say half a year or so after the whole debate after the bank and financial reform began, the dodd-frank bill ultimately signed in 2010. there are a lot of rich acutely progressive economists and thinkers who believe that wall street was not reformed. wall street was the one that precipitated this whole crisis by creating this securitization

mania over sub-prime mortgages and in fact think urging increasingly reckless lending so that wall street could securitize unbundle these loans up and sell them to the world. that was part of the crisis and then there is some question about whether the same banks that were responsible for that lebanon banks the so-called shadow banking system has been adequately reformed. so you know yes that is a very legitimate concern. it is i think a separate debate from the economic impact of the stimulus but it's very much out there. >> host: another part of this economic stimulus as the federal reserve which of touched on but here's a tweet from one of our viewers who wants to know does yellen have what it takes to lead us out of our current economic situation? >> guest: janet yellen who i recently profiled for "national journal" as cnas one prominent economists outlier of the

princeton -- perhaps the best prepared federal reserve chairperson in history. now she spent almost a decade at the federal reserve and the federal races -- federal reserve system either as president of the san francisco federal reserve. she is highly regarded economists around the world. by all indications because she served alongside bernanke for quite a wireless is vice chairwoman in based on the testimony she has given she will be continuing his policies gradually ratcheting that the quantitative easing program and only gradually because for her as it was for bernanke the main concern is unemployment versus inflation. >> host: k. is next great valley new york, republican caller. >> caller: yes, i love your program. i want to tell everybody why there are no jobs. you have lost 320,000 dairy

farmers in the last few years, in 20 years. we keep paying the teachers, the firemen, and there's one more. but anyway you keep paying them with big wages. the union just falls to them but yet the dairy farmers -- we have farms today milking 30,000 cows and back in the depression roosevelt kicked out all of its field plants and made them come back down so other people who could make a living. i think that is what they ought to do today, take the big farmers. 600 cows, if you can't make a good living with 600 cows you

know you shouldn't be farming. >> guest: i have to admit to not gang up on the dairy farming issue but i will look into it. >> host: mike is next clearwater florida democratic caller. hi might. >> caller: good morning. first of all the stimulus would have worked much better had art government accept that more stimulus money particularly for transportation here in florida. secondly i would like to ask regarding the real unemployment historically. has that figure been used over time in the past or is this some new invention? thank you. >> host: wade michael, before you go. >> guest: which figure are you referring to, the official employment? >> guest: the so-called real unemployment that is touted

often. has that been used in the past or is this something new? >> guest: no, that has been the regular measure used by the bureau of labor statistics for, i can place it exactly but for at least a few decades i believe. was there another part? >> host: i think you addressed it. we will go into joe in winchestwinchest er california independent caller. hi joe. >> caller: hi good morning. i have three different subjects here. one of them is the stimulus and one is tarp. the gentleman that called in about tarp said that there was no mechanism for the debt to be paid back and those were all loans to the banks. the banks paid it back and they paid it back with interest. >> host: let's take that point. >> guest: that's true. the tarp money was paid back and

in that respect was a fairly successful program although there were other issues in the way the bailout money was paid out but it was paid out. >> host: one other issue about unemployment, you wrote a recent story here with the headline the gop's risky rebuff to long-term unemployed. what is happening with unemployment benefits long term and it likely to come back up? >> guest: i would hope so because that program as simply allowed to expire. the extended long-term unemployment benefits and you have a lot of people who are really hard up. the point of that article you just mentioned was that again contrary to some of the rhetoric in a political stump long-term unemployed are not any particular ethnic group. it's not the urban poor. it's not the welfare queens that

sometimes republicans have said. infected cuts in all ethnic groups -- ethnic groups all over the country from african-american to whites to hispanic older or younger workers, a lot of people who were just caught in the middle of the job contraction so i think if you are a politician you right off the long-term unemployed at your peril because they may indeed be part of your political base. >> host: david in california republican caller name your town david. >> caller: mckinleyville. since barack obama was elected president we have been running deficits in the range of trillions of dollars a year which means the government has been spending a trillion dollars or more a year than it has been taking in taxes. that's a lot of stimulus in the economy has improved significantly. i think we need to take a lesson from what's happening in north

dakota. in north dakota the economy is booming. anybody that can drive a truck or turn a wrench is making six-figure salaries i have heard and it spreads to the rest of the economy. what is different about north dakota from the rest of the country? well in north dakota the resources that are available to be developed on private land puts them largely out of the reach of the government. in california we have an enormous amount of natural gas and oil that could be developed but unfortunately we have a democratic legislature and a democratic governor and there's no chance in the world that they are going to be developed. >> host: okay david let's take your point with michael hirsh. regulation. >> guest: one of the most interesting dimensions of the u.s. economy over this really historic five-year period when we faced the financial

depression is you do have pockets of growth in different areas a lot of them in metropolitan areas. minneapolis, st. paul for example is an interesting contrast to its neighbor detroit. we have all been writing about the disaster in detroit that filed for bankruptcy but minneapolis-st. paul has had something like a 5% unemployment rate but continual growth through physical period cc these pockets and that is a reflection of state and often metropolitan areas, good policies, regulatory policies that are different. so i mean it's a very interesting thing to do to look at a country that while overall employment rate has been very high has had some successful regions that actually should be models i think for the future. and i just wanted to emphasize one thing.

in his comments the caller referred to this idea of these enormous deficits in this period i think one of the areas that the obama failed was to impress upon the public just how dramatic the crash this was. i think that there was a tendency to sort of glossed over how severe the crisis was and how unique the stimulus was. this was not the start of the obama administration's programs. this was a shot of adrenaline to sort of restart the heart of the economy that was really going down. that is how dramatic was and we tend to forget. there was no private investment. the man had collapsed.

in that environment almost every economist across the lord and the political spectrum would agree that you've got to stimulate the economy somehow and the private sector. we tend to forget just how bad it was five years ago. i just wanted to bring that into the discussion. >> host: michael hirsh chief respond with "national journal" and go to "national journal".com for more reporting. thank you. appreciate your time. >> guest: thank you.

>> let me end by returning to my southern itinerary since the state of the union. as we have said this itinerary has kind of reflected the all of the above. i have mentioned fossil fuels, efficiency and renewables. tomorrow i will be traveling to waynesboro georgia to finalize a $6.5 billion loan guarantee for the construction of two new nuclear reactors at the focal electric generating plant. in 2010 the department of energy offered to conditional commitments for $8.3 billion of loan guarantees to support construction of the country's first new generation nuclear power plants in nearly 30 years. this was again in the spirit of the first hoover challenge of getting some new nuclear plants

built and three separate commitments were made to three of the four owners of the plant and tomorrow the department is closing on two of those commitments to georgia power and ob constituting $6.5 billion of those loan guarantees. so truly i want to emphasize again we are working across-the-board to try to push the technology forward into the marketplace for all of our energy sources. these will be two new 1100 megawatt westinghouse reactors. the first deployment of this next generation of advanced reactors. in fact earlier at the d.o.e. cost share are moving towards design certification of this and other reactors on the program to stimulate the development of next generation of reactors with safety features. once completed these new units

at focal will produce enough safe reliable carbon free energy to power about 1.5 million homes and the president emphasized in did make it clear that he sees nuclear energy as part of america's low-carbon energy portfolio and of course nuclear power is a major part of our carbon free portfolio.

>> he wanted me in that spot for two reasons. one he thought i could handle it and secondly he wants people, young people of both races to come into the supreme court room as they all do by the hundreds of thousands and somebody say who was that man up there and someone says he's just a gentleman of the united states. he wanted that image.

>> the congressional budget office yesterday released a report finding that increasing the minimum wage could benefit about 16 million workers and cost half a million others their jobs. at a breakfast hosted by the gin science monitor the head of the cbo douglas elmendorf answer questions about the report and other topics. this is just over an hour. >> we will start. thanks for coming everyone. our guest today is douglas elmendorf director of the congressional budget office. this is his fifth visit with our group and there is probably a trend there. mr. elmendorf became director of the cbo in june of 2009 and

brings an impressive background to the assignment. his undergraduate degrees from princeton phi beta kappa and his masters and doctorate in economics or from harvard. he a4 been named cbo director he taught at harvard and was on the staff of the council of economic advisers and the federal reserve ordinance served as treasury secretary for economic policy. just before his selection as head of the cbo he was senior fellow in economic studies program at brookings. the biographical portion of our program has ended and now on they botanical details as always we are in the record here. please no live blogging or trading or other means of riling while the breakfast is underway. there is no embargo when the session ends except that our friends at c-span have agreed not to air the video of -- one hour to give reporters a chance to file. if you would like this question please do the traditional thing and i will happily call on one and all.

i will start off by offering her guess there pertains to make open, to the move to questions around the table. thanks for doing this. appreciate it. >> thanks very much for having me here and i appreciate the invitation to come back. we release this together with our outlook for the budget and economy a few weeks ago. the developments of the labor market during the past several years have been among the most puzzling aspects of the economic recovery and for millions of americans among the most distressing aspects of the economic recovery. we took a particularly careful look at labor market developments as part of this years of dating ever economic and budget directions. in our view the slow recovery of them labor market stems primarily from slow growth in the demand for goods and services. and to a smaller extent various structural factors. our analysis shows that

considerable slack remains in the labor market. we estimate that the economy is about 6 million jobs short of where it would be if the unemployment rate was back down to its pre-recession level in the labor force participation rate was back up to the level it would need without the current cyclical weakness. looking ahead under current federal laws regarding taxes and spending we expect the unemployment rate will decline to five .8% by the end of 2017 and 25.5% by 2024, reflecting both the strengthening economy and strengthening demand for workers but also the structural factors pushing up the unemployment rate today. we think the participation rate shown on the middle panel will move down despite upward pressure from the strengthening labor market and drawing some workers back to the labor force there will be continued downward

pressure on the participation rate from democratic changes particularly the retirement of baby boomers generation. the participation rate will decline for the coming decade. a share of the population that will be in employed shown on the bottom panel is subject to the same cross currents. it will be cyclical pressure upward on that rate as the economy strengthens and firms fill the need to hire more workers that there'll be ongoing downward pressure from demographic factors and some aspects of fiscal policy. on balance we think the unemployment to population ratio will rise a little bit over the next few years but then declined further after that. i hope that after some attention to other aspects our recent work has subsided a little you will have a chance to go back and look at this report because i think it covers some very important issues for the u.s. economy. i will stop there and try to answer your questions.

.. according to the ca the bulk of economic studies have concluded the effects on employment of minimum wage increases in the arrange now under consideration are likely to be small to nonexistent.

>> i don't want to respond directly to what the cia has said. we try to talk about power. i want to be clear that our analysis of the effects of an increase the minimum wage is completely consistent with the latest thinking in the economics profession. we did an exhaustive review of the literature in this area of through reports that were released last month, of very large number of studies, as you know reaching a range of conclusions. in the studies all have strengths and weaknesses. and in the long mythological appendix to a report we talk, some of the characteristics of studies that made them more less compelling in our view. but of balanced reading of a set of research studies in this area led us to conclude that an increase in the minimum wage would probably have a small negative effect on employment, but there was substantial uncertainty around the estimate,

as we reported. naturally some economists focus more on studies that show smaller employment effects. other economists focused of studies that show larger and pontifex. our responsibility for the congress is to report the middle of the distribution for possible outcomes and possible, the range of likely outcomes. that is what we have done this report. you try to compare what our analysis to other economists have said, most other economists don't have to put numbers behind the words of their evaluations. but we have looked at some statements. one place one might look is a survey conducted by economists at the university of chicago. they asked a panel of leading economists from across the country questions about economic policy on a regular basis. and when they asked that panel about the effects of raising the

minimum wage to $9 per hour when year ago about half of the economists at some answer to that question and said that the increase to $9 would make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment. and the other half of the economists responding to that survey said that it would not make it noticeably harder for low-wage workers to unemployment in our analysis of the effects of raising the minimum wage to $9, we give a range from a reduction in employment of two and a half% to us slight increase. we all know exactly what respondents to the survey made by noticeably harder, but a noticeably harder means that two and a half percent reduction in employment at our range of-2 and a half% to a slight increase seems to us to map quite nicely in said those economists thinking it will be harder and have thinking it would not be. of the plus one might look is to the letter signed by several

hundred economists and begin the increase in minimum wage. of course that is not a random sampling of the economists of a percent to support raising the minimum wage. they're presumably disproportionately those who think that the effects on employment will be smaller. but none the less, not sure that we would disagree with the statement of the evidence. what they said is that -- let me see if i can find my copy of it. what they said is that there would be increases in the minimum wage which have that little or no negative effect on the employment of native to the minimum wage workers. again, they'd all say what they mean by little in a statement. the increase in the minimum ways that we looked at that is most analogous to the increases in their research literature is this $9 increase that we estimate will range from two and a half% reduction to a slight increase. again, without knowing exactly what little means in this context, the range we have looks to me like a little reduction to

be sensitive to have essentially no change. tell us they will say is that we also look, as you know, at the effective way. and we estimate that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would have a much larger effect on employment, still i think a small effect a larger than the effect of raising the minimum wage to $9 which differs for good reason. the first point to recognize is that it could affect a lot more people than raising the minimum wage. so we estimate the number of people whose wages would go up would be much larger than that $10.10 raise in the $9 raised, 16 and a half million as opposed to seven and a half million. many more people are affected, but we think that there will be a larger percentage reduction in employment for that larger pool, and we offer a number of reasons in the report for expecting that to be somewhat larger.

let me just highlight to. the increase of $10.10 says that we talked about molester some legislation, an index for inflation at that point which is rather different from the past experience with the federal minimum wage and of many of the race is a state levels where rages have been wasted -- raised in nominal terms and fixed at higher normal levels but been eroded in real terms to inflation-adjusted terms overtime. the increase that we model would be adjusted for inflation. so higher not only to start with the higher on an ongoing basis which will induce larger responses by firms. secondly, this increase to $10.10 gets much more deeply into the distribution of wages then increase to $9. you can see this on the cover of the report. the increase to $9 puts the minimum wage back up near the tenth percentile of workers' wages and increases the $10.10 and was the minimum wage much higher and that the my relative

to distribution of wages. and by cutting further into the ways distribution of because of a large increase in because it is starting from minimum-wage where it is that, so far as the distribution, a means that employers will face a larger shocknek cost and have more incentive to encourage the adjustment cost that would be needed to make larger changes in their workforces. so we think there are very good economic reasons. and those of the say in the report for why the $10.10 index increase, a bigger effect on employment and the increased to $9. in the $9 increase will be analyzed this is the increase that most economists seven allies in the past. we think estimates are completely consistent with the balance of the evidence. >> let me just ask one myself. the move order to demand paul. bryan boiler and steve to start.

you have about a year left a near term, little less. do you feel that you are the cbo director who has worked in the most extreme political conditions? and if so, has it changed the reaction added to this other reaction to the affordable care study or any others? has a chance to you and your colleagues do your work? >> when i became director was taken out to lunch by my predecessors as a group. and they all told stories of their experiences. and it was the sort of plus or after you wonder william and the right thing, not by signing up. they all have stories to tell. i cannot compare my experience to them. but i will say that we worked quite hard and very carefully on all sorts of issues that don't see a lot of public attention. and we work very hard and carefully on these that do

receive public attention. rick focused on trying to find the best possible estimate so that congress has the best information to work with. we do that across the board in all sorts of estimates that matter a lot to one community or a small set of people, and this is the matter a lot to large. and we don't take them any differently based upon the attention of the get command we don't do anything differently if we think there will be more or less adverse reactions from different people. that is just not what we do. >> at 2-part question. obviously you worked in the clinton treasury department. all other democrats figured that you were sort of given the benefit of the doubt on issues like minimum wage. added ec keeping politics out of your analysis? and the second question is what are you guys working on next? >> on the first question, my

personal views about economic policy are completely irrelevant to the work we do. in the personal views of my colleagues are completely irrelevant to the work that we do. congress does not care what we would do personally about policy, and they should not care about that. they have hired us to do objective analysis, and that is what we do. that is what hundreds, maybe thousands of people have done as cbo for 39 years. that is what a string of directors meets be have done. the second question, we are working a lot of. i don't have any particular. >> feel free tumbler something out if it comes to you. >> so, your budget and economic outlook, you estimated that as a result of the affordable care act there would be a reduced demand for jobs to the tune of

about two and a half million by the end of ten years. and then in this minimum wage report you're talking about a reduced demand by employers. is there any kind of interaction or overlap between on the one hand people demanding less work and on the other hand employers having less demand for workers if the wage goes up? >> our analysis of the affordable care act affects the labour market under crow law. the prospective effects of a minimum-wage increase on a labor market more less is independent. the labor market is affected by lots of forces all the time. federal policy, only one piece of what is happening. so for the affordable care act we estimate that there would be a reduction in the supply of

labor because the affordable care act reduces the incentive to work by little bit through a variety of channels. and i think you should think of that as a more less separate question from what the effects of the minimum wage increase would be. as you know, the men always increases affecting employer demand for workers. but the difference stops with that. if the minimum wage increase or estimated passed into law in our future projections on the economy would take on more depth as well as other features of the tax code as well as the economy, so there is no particular interaction between them. >> brian. >> right. >> on those same two issues, as this first order? the obamacare act peace, does that take into account what happens after the two and a half

million? the minimum wage, a range of employment effects, but you also say that a lot of people have higher wages. is there multiplier when you factor in the second order, if that happens in the job market? >> well, in the analysis of the affordable care act we focused on the effect of the labor markets in the second half of the coming decade and which point we expect the labor market will be that much closer to its traditional balance between the supply of workers and the demand for workers. we talk a bit in an appendix about what happens between now and then, but the quantification that we offered was for the second half. so that is a point at which we think most people who are looking for work and will be able to find work. so that the people who would withdraw from the labour force at that point would not be or work fewer hours while still working would not be replaced by

those people who would be stepping up. in our analysis of the effects of raising the minimum wage, we have focused on the in the 2016. wage increases would be largely a phased then. and our estimate of the employment effects, the estimates to incorporate the effects of the redistribution of income down the income scale toward people are more likely to spend that money and thus the boost in demand for business services and a boost unemployment that would come from that in our quantitative estimates are the netting out of that effect with the effects that we talked about. >> basically the two and a half million and the small increase, they both incorporate. >> stephen back in the cheap seats. >> talk to you about the process and rules that the cbo follows. this seems like members of

congress a figure out ways to gain that 10-year budget window. we conduct the payments. ten years worth the paper stood to one year's worth of spending, which is as structural thing that will have to come back again and again and again. i am wondering if you have any, you know, constructive criticism recommendation from members of congress, either about the process or just how to approach the cbo. and i guess second of all, if there is -- i don't know if you guys do, when you do your scores -- for example, if you are over ten years to pay -- if you spend now and then end up paying for it, presumably especially with the current deficit they're is a debt cars that builds up. i actually don't know whether you include that 10-year at that cost in the early years for the debt service costs in your cost estimate, but do you do that?

can you do that? should you do that? >> we do not incorporate debt service and our normal cost estimate. we just offer year by year for ten year estimate of the cost and provide a stir in summation of those numbers over the ten years. members of congress understand the policies that widen the deficit also encourage debt service and it has had the opposite effect, but it is hard to know a particular policy will affect the service. reno have a government, financing, existing debt between projections of what happened, but to understand just how the increment would be finances of a question. and i don't think that our not including that extra whatever would be ten, 15, 20 percent charge, if you will, what really vex the fiscal policy decisions. it was understood across the congress. >> in at 10-year look back it would not necessarily be in

balance if you have included the debt service costs in a situation like are talking about where you had an immediate deficit increase in the first year paid for either in the last three years are over ten years, correct? >> i think one of my predecessors said the number of years ago, process is not the problem. the problem is the problem. so i would like to use that here i think that there are -- we think that there are important differences in the effects of policies beyond the 10-year window. then we try to look out beyond the window. and our analysis of health care reform legislation in our analysis of legislation and a climate legislation that was discussed a number of years ago in a few other cases. we look beyond : the because those are situations where we think the policies being contemplated would have markedly different effects that we should bring to the attention of the congress. and in those cases the congress particularly interested, but i do not think in general that

cutting off the 10-year changes much if we cut off a 15 or 20 or did any other thing in particular. >> with what you mentioned, immigration, and you guys did essentially a sort of dynamic scoring and immigration, figuring out how the labor would affect. do you expect that within ten years cbo will be doing dynamic scoring more broadly for taxes and spending? >> no, i do not. we did 500 formal cost estimates last year, maybe ten times as many in the formal estimates as committees were developing proposals, and for 99% or so of those proposals we examined there would be no noticeable microeconomic effect, and that kind -- the time that we require to macroeconomics estimates would be simply paralyzing for the congress on some many issues a real distinction between that set of estimates and most of our

work in the work that we do on a few pieces of legislation that would have a significant macro economic effect. so is the case where the goal of legislation in the minds of many people as the reason they oppose it in the minds of many other people is the significant change in the size of the u.s. labor force. cbo people felt the number of years ago when this came up that given that that was so integral to the legislation that pretending there would be no change in the labour force which would be our standard assumption would just be so much in various with the issue that congress was confronting now we need to reach beyond our normal approach. so the cbo did a number of years ago i read it again last year, a separate analysis down the normal cost estimate that looked as some of those macroeconomic effects. msn on some occasions that if the congress works, contemplating overhauling the u.s. tax code, that it would have significant macro economic effects, that we would be happy

to do analysis of those economic effects, but those situations are not correctly viewed as rare exceptions, exceptions in cases where it really matters, where it could -- or the congress is objectives of the issues at stake are around of the labour force or the size of the economy. that is just not true for what we do. >> for a sense? i'm sorry. >> to clarify, you're saying that you would do dynamics are along the lines? >> an analysis. >> okay. >> if the congress were interested, the economic effects of tax reform. and some of the past, some analysis. for example, we do an analysis almost every year of the economic effects of the president's budget. and to remind you how this works, when normally release an estimate of the president's proposal conditioned upon our

baseline economic projection analogous to how we would do a cost estimate. and then we follow that up maybe a month later with an economic analysis of the business proposal and know that economic analysis and carper is the effects of changes in budget deficits and also the macro changes and incentives, the changes in tax rules and other things. so those are separate pieces of work. and again example of the case, economic analysis six basically a month after the basic budget analysis. so what i have said, and i have said this and starting with the joint spectrum, that is a rejection. if they put forward a tax reform proposal we would be happy to do an analysis of its economic effects. that would be separate from the basic estimates. actually would come mostly from the staff of the joint committee on taxation, policy, so these are separate pieces of work that we have offered, that we did for immigration and a real offer to do in this case.

>> the score. would not have that dynamic scoring. >> would not have those effects. >> normally read the l.a. times. did you talk a little bit about what the experiences of states that have expanded coverage, how that informs your analysis of the liver force participation in most recent report and then secondly, just very quickly, i think it has been a couple of years as you guys have done an analysis, changing health insurance and given the apparently renewed interest among some in the helen a particular subject, any chance to representative plans to revisit that? >> the first question, we look at what has happened in some states, the community health insurance coverage, but there are not very many of them have done something that is particularly analogous. so are our estimates were based mostly on evidence from other

circumstances. i will mention to sorts of pieces of evidence. one is the phasing out of subsidies and insurance exchanges. as your income rises and the affordable care acted creates an implicit tax. and we estimate this sex of that -- sense of that we used the changes inexplicit tax rates and how they affected the labor supply. we did a review of the literature a year or two ago, wrote a set of papers explaining how we read the literature and the estimates that we drew from it. so we use that literature primarily to make the changes. for the effects of the medicaid expansion committee of four will carry it all with your literature and the test is that expanded or contracted medicaid in the past. some of the states that had done affordable care act to perform have done that. and also much larger set of steps that have made changes

over time, but for much larger. redrawn that. your second question, actually, one of the approaches to deficit reduction, we analyze it in our report last fall, changing the tax treatment of of insurance. i would refer you to our report on that. >> i could follow up on the states, can you talk a little bit? massachusetts, obviously, member states have more limited medicaid expansion, added that jive are not jive with the tax analysis of subsidies in terms of measuring? does that make sense? >> i think that to estimate the effects of the affordable care act on the labour market we have to keep track a lot of different channels. you know, the principle that providing health insurance subsidies to low-income people would reduce the incentive to work was not something that is a novel idea. we wrote about in the summer of 2009 before the proposals in terms of the basic factors, but

to do the quantitative estimates we have to follow a lot of different channels. redrawn the best estimates that we could. i think that the effects of the medicaid expansion, we estimated separately on the effects of the changes. there are two literatures the redrawn, distinct literatures commandery drew lessons from each of them to apply to the aspect of the affordable care act, which there were most closely linked. >> kathy taylor. could you update for me some statements he made at the 2011 hearing about the role of uncertainty in the marketplace and its effect on the economy? that would be that federal policy diminishing household spending. what are those policies today? have they changed? and to what degree is it having an impact and is it waxing or waning from 2011?

>> we and a lot of other analysts think that uncertainty about federal policies have we known the recovery. but neither we nor other analysts, i think, have been successful at quantifying. i have spoken in the past about the uncertainty about fiscal policy and also uncertainty by regulatory policy in health care in the financial system. and energy regulation. i think uncertainty about the federal fiscal policy is also smaller today than it was in 2011. that tax -- the expired tax cuts from 2001 s three have been mostly extended and barley allowed to expire, so there is no cliff or deadline right around the corner for that. the uncertainty about appropriations seems to have been settled. not to say that the congress

could not come back to that issue, but there is some expose a plan that has been agreed to. so we think that those developments have reduced the uncertainty of our fiscal policy but have not eliminated. analysts can read in studies and elsewhere effect of the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, so clearly future adjustments of some sort will be needed. but i think uncertainty is less than it was. i cannot quantify it before and can really quantify it now either. >> there is lot of relief that the budget deal one for two years. there are proposals up there to

get to a two-year budget assistant. what are the pros and cons of those? >> well, i think you would be as the manager of a very, very small federal government it would serve to be helpful for us to know what our funding will be some time into the future. presumably i expect it is much more important for people running a large and complicated parts of the federal berman. on the other hand congress takes advantage of the annual process to recalibrate where it thinks funds are better spent. one just to put that on autopilot and congress loses that flexibility. it is not for us to say.

>> if you about your four years or so without going through the process -- >> that is another good point. i think the question is not so much with the official processes really how the process works. if we would officially to the biennial budgeting and then having officially gone would not make that much difference. it is but the official process and the way the process unfolds. >> danielle. >> analyze two different minimum-wage levels. i am curious, and the proposal is a possible their is a minimum wage type? the literature you have reviewed that would have an increase some people's paychecks? like a dollar estimate 50.

>> of a possible increases. i don't want to speculate too much, but i would just say, there is no particular trick in the analysis that we are doing. what economists have been found. we estimate that if the minimum wage or raised the vast majority of people would keep their jobs and get higher wages. something like 97 and 99% for the people effected by the increase the minimum wage. but at the same time, 1%, 3% people would not be a will to find employment. i think as you move to larger and larger increases in nominal wage from zero up so $9, you're likely to find progress of the larger numbers of people from raising wages and progressively

larger. >> assertions made by democrats and those on the left after your report came out said your reports conclusions contradict the consensus among members of america's top economists. you disagree with that assertion second question, do you think that whether -- that letter sent by the economists said increases in the minimum wage have little to negative effect on the employment are little -- of minimum-wage workers. you seem to think that your report winds up with that assessment by the economist? do you think that a loss of 500,000 jobs would equal little to no negative impact on the unemployment? >> i'm not trying to speak directly to what the leader has said. i can only speak about our analysis. as i said before, our analysis is quite consistent with the latest thinking by economists.

the -- what i noted about the letter and survey is that they do not put numbers to their words. so it is hard to know exactly what people meant by little to no effect. it is hard to know exactly what people meant in the survey by noticeably harder to find a job. the most consistent of the increases one half -- gin at% and a slight increase. the get to nap% decline, many people would be a small decline. a slight increase would be consistent with no effect.

one can be sure exactly how the results would come. that is not a representative sampling. of the cuban tell anything that particular wording that is different than what we have done, nor does that wording prove those economists would agree with what we have done. what we had done ourselves is to do a very careful reading of the literature and have put weight on a wide range of results. naturally, i say put more weight on certain studies and others will reach different conclusions , and some economists and undoubtedly will find our estimates of the employment effects to be larger than they would pick themselves, and others would find our estimates to be smaller than it would pick themselves. our job is to provide the congress with a balanced reading, and we have done that. >> i'm sorry, go ahead. [inaudible question] >> i am wondering if you could put a percentage to what the chances that the impact on unemployment at the 1010 range

could be far lower, said 100,000. >> well, so, the rains that we provided for an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 is from a very slight decrease in employment to-a million markers. and we say that we have constructed this race to capture to as best we can judge two-thirds of the distribution of possible outcomes. that means that there is, and our judgment, a one sixth chance that the effects of raising the minimum wage would be a bigger decline in employment than a million and one sixth chance they're raising their rates would either reduce to but not reduce employment at all or increase employment. a two-thirds chance of the effect would be between a slight decrease in the decrease to about a million workers. >> we're coming to you. >> with this surprise you about? >> its reaction. >> much of the work that we do,

there's a range of reactions. we take great pains in doing analysis such read it at that time a console people of a large range of views. he led the people that we list at the end of the document we spoke about this work. you will see from knowing their own work that they can to this question with a very different set of views on what would happen. we understand that there will be a range of reactions among professionals, analysts outside the cbo and among policy-makers and commentators outside the cbo does not surprise us, nor the seven effect on the word that we do. >> a see a, you scored with the domestic language said to my implementation dates. is there anything then we should be thinking about as executive branch eases or changes of the deadlines we have been seeing, either for the individual market are employers that would make us want to reconsider or reevaluate

the fiscal impact of the affordable care act, either short-term or long-term, especially since the administration has been so interested in saying it is already been in the cost curve. >> as part of our regular update with their budget projections we update the affects of the coverage provision, insurance coverage provision. we don't, as part of the process update the effects of medicare changes of the revenue changes because those parts of the affordable care act make changes to a large body of existing law. and it is not possible at this point to really disentangle the effects of the formal care act in medicare, of a pre-existing law in medicare. the affordable care act is not release separable from the other parts of medicare law. insurance coverage provisions are more difficult because there building a new superstructure on

the rest of the federal law. so just the nature of our baseline projections we get estimates regularly in this process of the effects of the insurance coverage parisian. and our estimate of the effects of those provisions on the budget has not changed substantially since 2010. we have incorporated a slew of new analysis, a slew of changes from a we had expected in the laws being implemented, but on balance our estimate of the budgetary effects of those provisions on a year by year basis is not much different at all from the we set four years ago. it's in your totals a year but had changed because the budget -- ten year budget window is now a number of years further into the future than it was four years ago. but a year to year basis from the various changes that have been made by the administration and implementation as a result of the supreme court decision as a result of the developments in the health care system, as well

as analysis by at us and others to all those things on balance had not changed there estimate very much. we will be, as part of our spring baseline projections once again updating the effects of the coverage provisions command that gown no way that will come out. you will all get to know about it at the same time together in a few months. as the affects of affordable care act on health care costs, we have said before and still believe that we don't know what effect those provisions are having. there is an extensive -- a growing, not a sense of yet, but the growing literature of economists analyzing the slowdown in health care cost of the past dozen years so. we did a report last summer about the slowdown in medicare spending growth. we liked -- that was before the affordable care act as a religion the effects of the business cycle which we found to be not detectable and the effects of many other changes. over time i think economists

will study the question, how much the four will correct is a matter for health care costs, and then we will know. we don't know now. there are a few specific channels. it brought down payments to medicare providers. so that reduces health care, federal health care spending in national of the spending, but the more indirect effect the law may be having on the way medicine is practiced in the private sector is not something that we have any psychoanalysis to bring to bear upon. >> well, economists are still thrashing around a bit about the issues related to the great depression in 1930's. so economist elected things for a long time and have someone different views. i think the challenge for the affordable care act will be that some of the channels are rather indirect. so one can tote up the effect on medicare payments to survivors, but the extent to which the

spread of accountable care organizations or medicare penalties for remission and patients for hospitals, the extent to which those changes in law will spill over to help health care delivery outside of medicare goes are several factors, subtle connections command that think there will be hard to detect, but i expect that in a few years certainly you will see cover research. there will be trying to get that . >> i just wanted to follow-up on the participation rate forecast that you have. did you see that as happening mainly because of demographic gauging, or is it also a long-term diminishing of all age groups or your orders? and what are the implications of that? is seems to me taking all six

and a half% unemployment, a threshold where they say it's likely that we will keep interest is low for a lot longer than that may be because of the participation, back. by urinalysis is a messes of the fed, maybe we should just start thinking about raising rates center. >> we think if you look back over the last decade part of the decline in the participation rate has been the aging population and part of it has been changes in participation rates within age groups. as we look ahead we think there will be some further decline within age groups, but not very much. we looked at what has been going on and those effects are mostly winning.

is really dead most of what has gone on over the next decade is aging and the population. we have a large number of people who are moving from an age at which most people works to an age in which most people now work which is visible in the federal budget and the costs for social security and medicare and medicaid and is visible in the labor force participation rate, but i emphasize that we also think the participation rate has been pushed down by this cyclical weakness in the economy if the demand for workers was stronger, so demand for products was strong enough that they felt the need to hire more workers to meet that demand, then we think the participation rate would be a percentage point higher than it actually yesterday. so we think that there are nearly 3 million people who are out of the labor force will come back in if the demand for workers and stronger. also about 3 million people who are in the labour force unemployed who would go back to work of the economy was

stronger, and that -- those two pieces are our tally that the economy about 6 million jobs shorts aware it would be if the participation rate were back up to where would be without the cyclical weakness at the un plan merabank tender is pre recession level. a great deal of slack left in the economy. add-in clause four reserve policy-making is an issue for someone else sit here and figure out. >> i use saying that your forecast, and no way, is predicting that that cycle of just not be observed or -- >> we think this like will diminish over mostly between now and 2017. we think that the economy is strengthening, not every weaker remind, but we think on balance the economy is strengthening and that that will push up demand for workers and bring down the unemployment rate which will force the participation rate. you don't see that the picture

because that upper pressure is being more than offset by downward pressure off. >> kevin. bass system. >> the question on the dca following up with my colleague's question. the urban institute and some others questioned one state, but added you manage that, and in a proper court that he could do all over again would you -- do you feel that the dca, part of the 10-year outlook was useful or muddy the waters given the fact that we don't know and won't know for a while?

was it helpful or do you feel that it has muddied the waters? >> well, our responsibility is to give congress are projections of what will happen in the budget and the economy and the current law. one aspect of current law that in binges on the labour market is the affordable care act. so we have no choice but to produce and houses about affordable care act and other features of the tax system and transfer system will affect the labour market and other parts of the economy. that is our responsibility to them and their responsibility to explain our analysis as clearly as we can. and we tried to do that in the appendix to the outlook. and when we thought there was sufficient degrees of understanding of what we don't we try to explain further in this law because we have in other cases. ..

we don't think that's more compelling than the is for many analyses on the effects of high tax rates and the chain of the medicaid program on labor supply so we put our emphasis on that broader literature based on a broader set of experiments. c. was serving correct in suggesting the massachusetts experience did not meet in net job losses? you didn't see that behavior? >> i think it's hard to know what the effects of the

massachusetts health reform was. the markets are effect did by drummer and member labor markets are affected by lots of things so extracting any particular factor is difficult. we estimated a few years ago and still i think very strongly that the american recovery act spurred employment and output relative to what otherwise what would happen in this country but at the same time lots of factors were affecting unemployment. >> you don't think it was a tragedy to lament? >> don't use words like that. good ones are bad ones. but you can't just look up a series of u.s. employment and know from that how much the recovery act did to the economy anymore than you can look at the series for many other individuals influence did to the

economy. >> we have 10 minutes left and will go to eric lawson and then chris moody before we do a second round. >> it's five years out. how would you compare projections on the stimulus that you and others thought compared to what actually happened with jobs but would you be willing to serve another term? >> on the first question there have been a number of analyses of the effects of the recovery act on the economy. they have reached a set of different conclusions. we still think in that case the more powerful evidence comes from a long history of research on the effects of changes in federal spending and taxes and we give some weight to the research that looks specifically at the recovery act that we put more weight on the research that has is looked over time at all sorts of changes in federal

spending and taxes and we have written about the evidence we have drawn on this case in the working paper a year or so ago so our assessment is still essentially what it was five years ago which is that the recovery act by raising federal spending and cutting taxes spurred the demand for goods and services in the economy at a time when demand was the constraining factor on unemployment and by doing that the recovery act raised output unemployment substantially relative to what would have been otherwise. and the second question, i love my job and i'm focused on that this year. >> okay, chris. >> media landscape has changed particularly with the rise of social media and we have seen a lot of times a lot of papers that are highly, certain things that are i guess hot political issues get amplified on twitter when someone may be writes a headline that is not particularly accurate.

we saw that in the health care study and that just gets amplified on twitter and all of a sudden the message is gone and it's the narrative. can you describe what it's like internally when you have a paper you have worked on for so long, thousands of words that gets reduced to a tweet that becomes the narrative? what is that like inside the cbo when it seems to get out of hand? >> as i said we try to write as clearly as we can about our analyses and in this case of the effects of the affordable care act on the labor markets we were quite clear in the outlook about how the effects we were describing would come almost entirely from changes in workers decisions about whether and how much rather than from employers decisions. at the same time we recognizerecognized in this case and many others the work that we do is technically complicated and people who read it will misunderstand us sometimes and

it's a regular part of our process to look at what people have written about our work and to give them a call if we think they have misunderstood it so a number of you talk to us about how you are interpreting our work to make sure you are seeing all the facets of it we reach out to you if we think we did something that shows that not everything was clear and we do the same thing of course with the people on the hill. we see things that seem to us to be misunderstandings of our work and we try to clarify it. basically i'm happy that there are it seems to me a growing number of people who are interested in serious quantitative analysis of public policy. i think that's a great thing for folks like me and my colleagues who do serious quantitative analysis of public policy but you are right that there is a faster feedback loop then there has been before and i think that increases the importance for us of being very clear about our results on release them.

>> is there someone in the cbo that watchers twitter and sees this narrative shaping up? for many of you know is watching what is happening but we are not a very large place and we have in any area you could name we have a bubbly fewer people doing that than you might expect so we rely on a few good people to cover a lot of territory and that's true with eric mitigation strategy and it's true with how we run our i.t. in all the areas we analyzed for congress. we try to get the very most out of the information we receive in our job is mostly to speak to the congress. i think it's important that the reporting of our work be accurate and we recognize that many members and staffers in congress won't go to our web site necessarily. they will learn about her or something else they have read so it's important we have that be right but our job is basically

give the analysis to congress, not basically to be the hall monitor in twitterverse about our work. >> you get the quote for the morning. >> you that's it, that's okay. >> paul. >> are you taking a more in-depth look at the effect of laws and proposals on the labor market and if so is that because you have a more sophisticated models? >> one of the areas we have focused on in the last five years at cbo is to strengthen our model and the effects of the policy on the economy. i think that is an absolutely crucial issue for congress because a lot of the proposals to deal with the growing budget deficits and debt have involved significant changes in policy that would affect the economy in potentially important ways and we think that as we look at

changes in immigration policy that are being considered, changes in tax policy that might be considered we think we need to be able to give congress estimates and analysis that is at the cutting-edge of what the economics profession can do. we have spent time building up our modeling area and we put it to use. we have worked in other areas as well. obviously we have strengthened our modeling of the health insurance system for people under age 65 who strengthen their modeling and for people over age 65. partly what we need to do at cbo all the time is to do the analytic work to be ready for the policy proposals when it comes and we mostly hit that target and i'm glad when we do and when we don't we regret it. we try to scramble to catch up. >> my apologies for being late today. two real quick things one

technical and one overview. the president ajit is supposed to be submitted march 4. how long do you think it will take to get something back to congress after that date and then the big overall question is you under notice stuff in november and december staying to stabilize the debt you need to have $2 trillion over the long term in ten-year savings in addition to pre-recession levels about 4 trillion over 10 years. it's very similar to what bowles-simpson was saying in 2010. i'm curious, walk us through the overview of how much progress was made on deficit reduction in these four years from 2010 to what seems to be now a lull in the budgetary woes. >> on your first question it takes us about a month to produce estimates of the president's equation but that timeframe berries depending on

what the policy proposals are and how familiar or unfamiliar they are to us and can also vary depending on the release of underlying data so we use a lot of data that comes out with a budget separate from his proposals but updating or baseline work so we won't make any precise predictions but in the past about a month. i can't speak directly to what old simpson and her colleagues were saying a few years ago. certainly there've been changes in federal policy over the last two years that have narrowed deficits as we project them for example and particularly caps on discretionary funding. there've also been changes in policy depending on the starting points of extension to most of the 2003 tax cuts worsen the deficit relative to the current data with amusing but allowing

some of those cuts to expire at narrowed the deficit relative to what other people refer to as a current policy baseline. it's very hard to keep track and we have not tried to keep track formally over the past two years. i think it's important for congress to understand that at this point in time what are the choices send constraints of faces going forward and as you said we reported in a report called deficit reduction and update that of congress wanted 25 years from now to have a debt-to-gdp ratio about where it is now over the next decade by $2 trillion to continue the deficit reduction in the tenth year at the same share of gdp beyond that. and to bring the debt down to the same gdp was on average over the past four years than we need to do $4 trillion of deficit reduction. that's the best estimate where we stand now and that's most important understand. >> what the guesstimate to where the numbers have moved since

2010? are they bigger than 2010 or smaller than 2010 do you think? >> depends crucially on what your benchmark is to start with in terms of expiring tax provisions. i think of one started from the view that assuming those tax cuts will be extended and certainly the efforts to reduce deficits since then have narrowed the future fiscal gap. we had to start them which was the current law than the extension of the most of those expiring tax provisions -- the fiscal gap. >> with that i want to thank doug elmendorf and held -- thank deborah for setting up. i hope you come back. >> i would love to. thank you very much. [inaudible conversations]

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>> now our insider's account of the restructuring of the u.s. intelligence system after 9/11. michael allen majority staff director of the intelligence committee discusses his looks "blinking red". this is just over an hour. >> good afternoon and welcome to the america foundation. i'm peter bergen. it's with a lot of pleasure that we get to welcome michael allen to talk about his new book "blinking red" and mike has had a distinguished career most