wendy edelberg will be going for some the congressional budget office.she's speaking for herself and not cbo. she's speaking for cbo, great. ben spielberg who has a nice paper with jared bernstein at posted on the website this morning, a link on a website about ways in which we might want to expand the automatic stabilizers. and then the third is phil swagel, university of maryland, formerly of bush treasury who will talk about how he sees things to each of them will speak for seven to 10 minutes ago bring to all. and we will have a discussion. try to come it's all yours -- wendy, it's all yours. >> i bet i can do it but you can do it faster. [inaudible] >> on wendy edelberg from the congressional budget office the congressional budget office. no, associate director for economic analysis and i'm delighted to be here to discuss the important topic. solemnity a quick roadmap of what i will say. first i will briefly walk you through cbo's budget and economic projections and i will highlight some of the significant consequences that we see from our projectio

i'm wendy edelberg from the congressional budget office. let me give you a quick summary of what i'll say. i'll briefly walk you through cbo's budget and economic projections and highlight some of the significant consequences we see from our projections of high-end rising federal debt. and how the economic projections influence our budgetary projections and the interplay of those two. finally, i'll talk about automatic stabilizers. role of automatic stabilizers and fiscal policy during times of economic weakness. all right. i'll skip that one. this might look familiar. david just showed it. so, under current law, revenues are projected to stay roughly constant as a share of gdp over the next decade. but with the aging of the population and rising health care costs, cbo projects a substantial boost of federal spending on social security and the government's major health care programs. so, alongside rising federal interest payments, deficits are expected to increase from their current level of 2.9%, a touch higher from the average of 2.8% ove