In 2010, the White House and the Congressional Budget Office seized upon the lowest estimate they could find: A brief from Rob Valetta and Katherine Kuang at the San Francisco Fed which suggested that extended unemployment benefits had added only 0.4 percentage points to the unemployment rate by December 2009.
The forecast is within the 6.1%-6.7% growth range predicted by the government in its budget presented late February and is faster than the estimate of 5% growth in the just-ended fiscal year.
He has also issued a second budgetestimate based on evidence from the 1960s, 1980s and 2000s that tax reform and spending restraint will increase GDP by about 0.5 to one percentage point a year.
The Congressional Budget Office long-range projections are growing worse with each estimate, and that assumes a very rosy 3% or more growth in the economy for each of the next five years.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimate that the mandate alone, separate and apart from the other provisions in ObamaCare designed to induce people to buy insurance, will be responsible for bringing in 16 million newly insured about half of the total estimated number of newly insured.
But the budget is not the place to project a very specific, precise estimate that implies when your troops move and what your levels of activities will be out in the future.