 So, as I think most of you know, among the many things that he did in his amazing career, Ned Gramlich served as deputy director and then acting director of the Congressional Budget Office. And so today's final panel in honor of that comprises past CBO directors, Doug Holtzheken, June O'Neill, Rudolf Penner, and Bob Reichauer. And we are really delighted and honored to be joined by Doug Elmendorf, who is the current director of CBO. Ned's mission was to inform and improve public policy. Doug and his predecessors are exemplars of that mission. And so I'm going to turn it over to Doug and hear what we have to hear. I'm delighted to be part of this event honoring Ned Gramlich and to be joined by four of my distinguished predecessors as director of the Congressional Budget Office. Let me begin by introducing each of them briefly. I think they only need a brief introduction. Rudi Penner served as CBO director from 1983 to 1987. He's also spent time at the American Enterprise Institute at OMB, at the Department of Housing, Urban Development, at the Council of Economic Advisers and the University of Rochester. And Rudi is now an Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute. Bob Reichauer served as CBO director from 1989 to 1995 after helping Alice Rivlin set up and run the organization between 1975 and 1981. Bob has spent most of the rest of his career at the Brookings Institution and at the Urban Institute where he was president for 12 years. He's also the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, a job that most universities would be described, I think, just as the chairman of the Board of Trustees. June O'Neill served as CBO director from 1995 to 1999. She also spent time at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights at CEA at the Urban Institute at Brookings. June is now the director of the Center for the Study of Business and Government at the Root College at the City University of New York. And Doug Holtz-Aitkin served as CBO director from 2003 to 2005. He's also spent time at the CEA at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Council on Foreign Relations, Columbia University and Syracuse University. Doug is now the founder and president of the American Action Forum, which describes itself as a center-right policy institute. The five of us, indeed all of us in this room, are gathered here today to honor Ned Gramlich and to honor the importance of policy research. As others have noted today, Ned was a formidable producer of policy research on many different issues. Just earlier this week, for example, some of his work on the benefits of government investment and infrastructure came up in a conversation at CBO. Ned was also a formidable consumer of policy research. When he was a governor at the Fed and I was here on the staff and would talk with him, I knew that I'd better have a lot of facts and analysis in my head and I'd better have them straight, or it was going to be an embarrassing experience. Because Ned was both an excellent researcher and a wise policymaker, he was a model of how policy research and policymaking fit together. He knew that good policymaking was founded on policy research and thus that getting the policy research right was crucial to getting the policymaking right. Of course, the importance of good policy analysis to policymaking is the reason the Congressional Budget Office exists. Congress established CBO so that it would have access to good information as it made decisions. The Congress has supported CBO for almost 40 years despite the recurring awkwardness of analysis that is inconsistent with policymaker's views because the members of Congress recognize that on balance they are better off with the analysis than without it. CBO was very lucky to have Ned for two years, first as deputy director and then as acting director in the mid-1980s. Ned helped to build and sustain an organization that believes, as he did, that providing Congress with good analysis will help to generate better policies and that better policies will help to make a better world. And that brings me back to our panelists. They're each going to offer their perspective on budget and economic policies and on the process of policymaking. After they speak each in turn, then they'll get a chance to ask each other questions. I'll ask them questions and you'll have a chance to ask them questions. So let's dive right in. I thought we would go in chronological order of being CBO director? No. Alphabetical order. Alphabetical order. Or whatever she wants to do. So you would like, well, I'm okay. I want to go last. Do you want to go first, Doug? Would you like to start? Please, go ahead. Thank you very much for the chance to be here today. When I left graduate school a long time ago, it was relatively unusual to have the opportunity to have a job market talk before the meetings of the American Economic Association. But at that time, I lusted after a job at the University of Michigan and indeed I got invited out to give a job talk prior to the meetings and I was so happy. Ned Gramlich was the chairman at the time. I remember meeting with him and saying that we're really excited this is great. It's going to be a wonderful opportunity. And I went in and I gave what was probably the single most horrific seminar ever in the history of job candidates. And I walked out and walked back into Ned's office and sat down. He looked at me as the kindest man I've ever met and he said, you're probably never going to grace the roster of a University of Michigan event again. I'm here and I'm very pleased. And he was just a fabulous, a fabulous person on top of all of his professional accomplishments and to be able to contribute something at an event that is dedicated to the principles Doug mentioned, which is the production of high quality information to help policymakers understand the implications of the choices they make is really a great treat. I believe the CBO is continuing the great tradition of producing high quality information. We're not making great decisions. I do want to stipulate that. What should we be doing from a national fiscal policy point of view? I think there might be some disagreement about the specifics of policies, but we know that fundamentally we have three pieces of the budget. We have the large mandatory spending programs conventionally called entitlements. The Medicare is Medicaid's Affordable Care Act, so Securities of the World. And they, in particular the health programs, have been documented exceedingly well by CBO to be growing more rapidly than we can sustain over the long term. We have the second class of spending programs, the discretionary spending programs, which fund all the thing the founders would recognize as the roles of government, the national security-based research infrastructure, these are currently capped and shrinking as a share of the budget, indeed projected to go to all historic lows in many cases. And then we have the tax code, which I think there's a pretty good consensus, leaves a great deal to be desired in terms of high quality tax policy. So what should we be doing? We should be doing tax reform. We should be doing major entitlement reform so that these programs can be put on a sustainable track and serve their constituents better. I mean, I think the part that gets missed when we start talking about the budget is that those programs are in fact not serving their beneficiaries as well as they should. I'm always appalled by the fact that social security is kept actually sound on the books by the promise to cut retirees' benefits 25% across the board in retirement, 20 years from now. That's a disgraceful way to run a pension program. And so certainly we need to have a social security program that's financially sustainable. We also need to have one where people know what the deal will be in retirement and we should be doing that now. And the same kinds of observations can be made about Medicare, Medicaid, and some of the other entitlement programs. They're not the high quality programs that they can and should be. And they also are financial dangers. We're not fixing those and we need to. But we are starving the discretionary programs and in the process, we are letting the legacy programs of the past literally crowd out our future because those discretionary programs are where all of the investments in the future take place. And so what we should be doing, I think, is very straightforward. We should be doing those kinds of reforms and we're in fact doing exactly the opposite. We are failing to undertake tax reform, something that we fail at regularly. We're probably world-class best practices of failing in tax reform. It's troubling. And what will probably happen in the next couple of years is we'll remain roughly on this autopilot and literally just push the period when we come to terms with the reality further out. That concerns me a lot because if you look at the basic CDO projections about the budgetary outlook, the current law projections are in fact pretty good projections now because with the gridlock and practically guarantees, that's what we'll do. If you look at those, we stabilize the debt as a fraction of GDP and we stabilize the deficit as a fraction of GDP until roughly 2017, maybe 18, sort of depends on what the economy does. And then everything starts to head north. That means that the moment the next president of the United States comes into office, there will be an enormous urgency to come to terms with this. And the idea that we can do a single reform quickly, I think, is open to some question. The idea that we can do the multiple reforms on both sides of the budget that we desperately need that quickly makes me quite nervous. And the failure to do it, I think, sends a very bad economic policy signal. If you are standing outside the U.S., you got locating a plant in the U.S. or hiring people if you're thinking about the future of your operations in the United States and you look at the rising and unsustainable debt under the current law projections, you really have three futures. And future number one is one where these policy changes are undertaken, you control the growth in the mandatory spending, you put the debt on a stable trajectory and hopefully declining as a fraction of GDP and that's a comforting future. Or you can do nothing and literally run into a sovereign debt crisis. That's not exactly a pro-growth future that would make you want to invest in the U.S. And the third is that you can sort of muddle along and ad hoc, in ad hoc ways, never come to terms with the fundamental spending problem, raise taxes and small bits and pieces to stave off trouble and over the long term really make this a much less attractive place for investment and for expansion. That's not a particularly pro-growth future either. Given the very difficult recovery that we've had, I think a premium has to be placed on better growth policies. And so I'm concerned about the political economy of where we are from a fiscal policy point of view right now. I think it's the number one issue facing our country. I mean, all senior directors believe that like when they wake up in the morning. But I generally think the moment is a serious one. How do you solve that? The favored solution of all politicians in these circumstances is to blame the process. And sometimes to blame the CBO director. But I don't think this is an issue of process reforms. I think this is a deep issue of leadership and of the willingness of people to do unpleasant things. And we haven't seen anyone willing to do that on either side of the aisle for quite some time. And so I'm in the end a very optimistic person. Despite all the troubles that the faces, we have as a nation always dealt with these things. And so I'd close by saying if you're looking at the politics, there could be some leading indicators of how we get do better than we were doing in the moment. And for me, the key leading indicator would be suppose Republicans in the Senate, Republicans do in fact regain control of the Senate. Then I would argue that the most important question would be how will they govern? Will they in fact invite Democrats into the process, pass bills that have an input from both sides and the chance that the President will sign them, or will they make a point for two years in the interest of the 2016 presidential election and nothing gets done? So we're going to find out. And I think that's one of the most important things for everyone in this audience and any audience to be looking for going forward. The most important thing is to say that I'm delighted to be here. I wish Ned was here. He was, as everyone has said, wiser than I certainly am and probably could have fixed this all. So we miss him dearly. Thank you very much, Doug. How's the June? Please. Sitting here, I sort of changed what I was going to say. What I originally had planned to talk about was the problems of prediction and forecasts which are extraordinarily difficult, especially when it comes to economic matters. But I think that what might be of more interest, I had the fortune or misfortune of having worked both at CEA for a while as well as at CBO and twice, once in different capacities. Originally, when CBO was rather new, I was head of one of the units of budget analysis. Well, at that time, CBO was smaller, so I did human resources, but that covered welfare, labor, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans, and some other stuff. But it was, and that was an extremely interesting experience. And actually, one of the things that I worked on then is something that is still not resolved. It had to do with social security. Should we have wage indexing or price indexing? And I wrote a paper about it, but it's still, obviously, the long run in social security is, as Doug has said, you know, that's not only social security, but the major, all our major, you know, programs of that sort are really key. And the long run deficit is because of the problems related to social security and Medicare, probably more than any other thing, Medicaid, not so much. But there's an enormous difference between the White House working for the White House and working for Congress. I was at CEA when Nixon was president, he was a fairly recent PhD graduate, and I was fortunate, actually, it was a very exciting experience. Nixon was president and had panicked when the unemployment and inflation rate went up. They were each, just around, this is 1971, they were each around 6%. And the election was coming up in 1972. You know, as I've remarked to some people, I think Nixon was one of the few people in the country who really believed that McGovern had a good chance of being elected, but in order to ensure it. And I think this is an example of the, Nixon was an extremely intelligent man, but politics outweighs your own, your political survival. And that's because, I think in his case, he really believed that he could do really good things and should be president. So what did we get? Well, he was seduced by Arthur Burns into the idea that the Fed could be used to increase that his re-election would be guaranteed. I don't know if he exactly said those words, but that was sort of the essence of what we all gathered, the folks of us on the staff at CEA, Arthur Burns had said, well, I'll pump up the money supply and that will get the economy going. There is a danger of inflation and you will solve that with incomes policy, which was then in vogue and we could have a wage and price freeze and that'll take care of that. And no one thought that this would really be done, but it was done. And I remember exactly when it happened. It was in August of 1971. Everyone was shocked. So we got wage, a wage price freeze and the next year inflation and unemployment dropped by half. So it might have seemed like a great thing to do initially, but then the predictable problems arose. Shortages everywhere. And eventually I think it put a pull on growth in the economy for at least a decade. It really, it ended up causing slowdowns, but there is, from the perspective of the White House, one thing was that the president was very accessible to the chair of the CEA. And we were physically in the old executive office, building so we were close. And then I stayed on during the Ford administration when Alan Greenspan was the chairman, and he too, he had a close relationship with Ford. And even though Nixon didn't follow, I'm sure it was not the advice of McCracken or Herb Stein to have, they argued otherwise, but they did have contact with the president and, but we were allowed quite a bit of latitude actually in writing the economic report. I think that the staff were serious economists and the chapters in the economic report actually vary. Chiswick and I had written several chapters jointly and we did put the chapters together to make a book. So it was, we were encouraged to do research, genuine research such as would be done for a journal article in the university. Congress, on the other hand, is a totally different type of thing. You are not employed by a particular person. When I was appointed director, it became sort of, it was a highly political choice. I didn't know any of the people who were interviewing me. I had no political connections, but I was, I was believed, I think, by Newt Gingrich who was sort of leading the search, that I was a conservative woman, which was true. I would be considered a conservative economist, sort of a Chicago type person. And Rush Limbaugh had endorsed me. I never met him. So I guess maybe that's what did it. But at any rate, the Congress itself is, you have all of these people, all of whom are worried about their political futures and all of have different kinds of constituents. So although we're at CBO, we're removed, we don't have members coming into our offices telling us what to do. I don't think you have, that doesn't happen. But they, but it's a difficult situation and you do learn a lot. One of the things is that, you know, as Doug has said, as economists we know what has to be done, but how can you convince people whose futures might be ruined if they followed particular advice? You know, for example, I think the one real problem is when it comes to the different possibilities for changing social security, it's very complicated. It's hard to explain to people what it would actually mean. Oh, it's very easy for someone who's opposed to it to terrify the public. So they'll say, oh, they don't understand that if nothing was done, their benefit, and that seems far in the future, their benefits would all be cut by 25%. They can be easily led to think that they themselves along the way will have much lower benefits than their parents or grandparents or anybody else had had. Newt Gingrich was constantly tormented. He had actually some good ideas for Medicare, but as soon as he began talking about them, they were sort of along the lines of Medicare Advantage plans. He was easily sort of vilified, and there was a TV ad that showed him morphing into some horrible monster as he talked about reforming Medicare. So I think that the difficulties of doing it of course shouldn't stop those of us who have some insight into the program for doing the best research that we can and convincing as many members as we can to go along. But the politics of the situation really cannot be ignored. I was personally dragged in with the Fannie, CBO was one of a few organizations that was asked to study Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and we did, and the paper, Marvin felt very good analyst at CBO, had written an excellent report about Fannie. But when I came to testify at the banking subcommittee that was the oversight for Fannie and Freddie, what I was faced, well, the staff, there was a very brave person chairing the subcommittee, and his staff was friendly. They called me and said, you watch out, because when you get there, every member of that subcommittee has been sent a draft of something they should read and was written by the staff at Fannie Mae, and they're all, of course, trying to destroy our study. But that was the case. The various members of that subcommittee that had the direct oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were all receiving generous contributions from Fannie Mae, and they were not about to course them, at least not publicly. It made it difficult to do any reforms. Fannie Mae did not stop there. They sent, I and a few other staffers at CBO met with vice president of Fannie Mae and a couple of vice presidents. They came in, it was sort of like a visit from the mafia. They said, you had better not release, it had not been publicly released the report, and they said, you had better not release this report. Well, you will be sorry. They didn't say exactly what they would do, but they tried to be as menacing as they could. They also took out ads in the newspaper. It's at CBO or a bunch of digit brains and pencil heads or something like that. Well, am I out of time? But I joined the story. I'm not hearing it happening to somebody else. I did have one serious thing to say, and that was something in thinking about my talk here on a serious side, is that one of the things that will make forecasting of the future difficult is that the elderly population have been changing. I don't know how widely that information has been disseminated, but they're much more likely to work. They're much more educated and they're richer. They have more assets. And so I think that in the minds of many people, I certainly depressed the rights about it. They envision the social security recipients as being widows who are totally impoverished and depend totally on social security. But that picture, although it exists, and certainly the lower quintiles of those receiving social security may fit that description. But social security recipients that are coming along the way are not in that mode. They're a different type of group. Thank you very much, June. Well, it certainly is an honor to be here at this conference remembering that he was such a great guy and we had a fine time together when he served as my deputy at CBO in the mid-1980s. As Doug implied, there is some temporary good news on the fiscal outlook. The deficit is less than one-third as a proportion of GDP than it was in 2009. The long-run outlook has improved some because of a pause in healthcare cost growth. But it'd be sacrilegious for anybody in the budget business to be happy. You have to point out that CBO's baseline has the deficit increasing again after 2015. And I think there is some evidence that at least some of the pause in healthcare growth is a very temporary phenomenon. I really do strongly believe that if a new president after 2016 was at all far seeing, he or she would make a full court press to resolve the long-run budget problem. Otherwise, you're just going to see a lot of floundering. It'll be very hard to mount initiatives and things like infrastructure, education, or much of anything else with a debt-GDP ratio hovering in the 78-80% range and threatening to rise. Now, I say that fully expecting that the severe caps on discretionary spending will in fact be relaxed perhaps as early as 2016. But even if they are relaxed, they will remain very, very tight. Absent thoroughgoing fiscal reform that starts to restrain health spending and social security. Do I actually expect the next president to make a full court press in that regard? Probably not, but it is interesting to dream and there'll be a lot of dreaming in this talk. Being so depressed by the current situation with regard to fiscal policy, I have turned to studying fiscal history a lot. I don't think you can exactly emulate the past, but you can identify characteristics of past successes and failures that just might help to push things along currently. To me, really the ideal reform of the past was not a broad fiscal consolidation, but rather the social security reform of 1983. It was provoked by the trust fund going broke. That was deemed a crisis. It did scare a lot of old folks, but it was a nice crisis in that it really didn't hurt anybody directly, economically. It could have been solved by a modest infusion of general revenues, but that would have radically changed the philosophy of social security, which gained so much of its political clout by creating the illusion that everyone pays for their own benefits. Well, President Reagan responded by proposing a rather dramatic cut in the benefits of early retirees, and that met the total firestorm. So he created the Bipartisan Greenspan Commission, which was supposed to solve the problem. Now, it's often said that this is one instance in which a commission seemed to actually work, but that's probably a false lesson. In fact, the full commission got absolutely nowhere. If you look back at the rhetoric, the Republicans seemed as adamantly against any tax increases as they are today, and the Democrats strongly opposed benefit cuts. It was only when a lump group, or excuse me, a rump group, was created under the skillful leadership of Senators Moynihan and Dole that progress was made with a mix of payroll tax increases and benefit slowdowns that appeared balanced in the short run. And looking at that history, it was really surprising to me how the rest of the commission went passively along with this rump group except for a very few Republican senators who still objected to the tax increases. Nevertheless, that commission only made the system financially sound for 50 years instead of 75 years that was the tradition of the system. And it was JJ Pickle, a member from Texas who engineered the most important single reform outside of the committee on the floor of the House by very gradually increasing the normal retirement age, and that did make the system whole at least temporarily for 75 years. Now, the chairman, Alan Greenspan, will tell you that the whole effort wouldn't have gone anywhere. Were it not for a silent agreement between President Reagan and Speaker O'Neill that neither of them would oppose the recommendations made by the commission. So I think that the main lesson from all of this is not that commissions can be successful sometimes, but that bipartisanship can be very successful if you really work at it, as did Senators Dole and Moynihan and President Reagan and Speaker O'Neill. The latter two had lunch almost every week, and it was a practice that might have served the current president very well, even once a month might have helped some. And I know that a lot of people might say that attempts at such cooperation would be futile today given the intense partisanship, but if one looks back at 1983, the rhetoric was really intensely partisan. I think the main difference is that there were people who were then willing to deal with one another than we see today. Well, another bipartisan effort at fiscal consolidation occurred in 1985 with Graham Rudman Hollings. With the fact of the phased in Reagan tax cuts that had passed in 1981 and the defense build-up, the Congress didn't do very much between 1982 and 1984, but raised taxes and tried to limit domestic spending growth. And that was a very unpleasant range of activities. And after all of that, they were quite frustrated by the fact that the deficit didn't come down. And it was Phil Graham who came up with this radical plan to specify declining targets for the deficit and to enforce them with across-the-board spending cuts. The deficit targets were based on our medium-term deficit forecast. And even though our error in an optimistic direction was really quite modest compared to usual forecasting errors, achieving the targets was much harder politically than the Congress originally anticipated. They, in fact, loosened the targets once confronted by a gigantic sequester in 1990. They backed off and they went into something that Bob knows very well, arduous negotiations at Andrews Air Force Base. That came up with a plan of spending restraint and tax increases but a plan that was promptly defeated on the floor of the House. The plan was finally tweaked by a group of a few leaders and ultimately passed. So one can ask whether the summit was a necessary preamble to the eventual agreement. One can ask whether some kind of summit, a large summit or maybe a small summit of leaders would work today. I think few would think it possible, but we did come sort of close with the Boehner-Obama agreement prior to the fiscal cliff. That soon fell apart, unfortunately. I think a clear technical lesson from Grand Rudman Hollings is that if you want to automatically trigger actions to achieve some fiscal policy, the deficit is a terrible variable to use as a trigger. It's just simply too hard to forecast. It's too volatile and it's controlled by outside forces only a little bit in the very short run by laws that the Congress passes. Once they established the 90 agreement, they had the wisdom to pass the Budget Enforcement Act which made sure that that agreement wouldn't erode through time. And with that act and its pay-as-you-go rules and its spending caps, the Congress specified targets that they had direct control over opposed to this deficit thing which kept getting out of control. But it's important to point out the act was truly an enforcement vehicle. It was not something that reduced the deficit by itself. When the act took form under the leadership of Leon Funetta, I'm afraid that I testified against it in the Budget Committee arguing that it would never work because it was totally fraught with loopholes. But in fact, it worked very well and the Congress did not exploit those loopholes until the late 1990s when they were confronted by a budget surplus totally by surprise. Well, those efforts at fiscal consolidations were followed by the 93 and 97 deals. The former was purely partisan and said it only got Democratic votes. And the Democrats suffered mightily as a result of it in the 94 election. It really tells me that any party trying to posture a budget deal should really bend over backwards to try and get some cooperation from the other party. It's become a cliché to say that significant progress will only be made if the two parties join hands and jump off the cliff together, but it is a true cliché, I'm afraid. And I think both parties have learned the lesson, unfortunately, that it is politically perilous to attempt anything alone. So what we need is a very strong political leadership and the courage to reach across the aisle and whether that's forthcoming is a total mystery at this point. Thank you very much, Rudy. Bob, last we've come to the end of the Alphabet, so you'll have to go now. We could go to the audience, and then you've heard from the optimists. I just want to start with a few reflections from a personal standpoint with respect to Ned. He and I were pretty good friends. We played tennis together. We played volleyball together, we played a lot of other sports. Any of you who knew Ned realized if you put a racket or a ball or a bat in front of him, he would want to play. He'd begin suiting up. And so we had a lot of fun. And we were both colleagues. We both have Brookings in the early 70s. And then again at the Urban Institute, three decades later, and I might add that the book that everybody's been talking about was at the Urban Institute, and we published it and were very proud of that book and having Ned as our colleague. Ned and I were also interested in a lot of the same kinds of policy issues and broader issues that faced society and the world. In the policy space, we had common interests in poverty and income distribution, community development, fiscal federalism, and of course the federal budget. I'm sure each one of you has a different group of topics that you and Ned in a sense shared. And if we put them all together, we'd probably have the encyclopedia of important public policy issues and we'd have a few pages each of us, but Ned would be cited on every one of the chapters because he was so amazingly broad. In the non-economic related space, we spent time discussing a wide variety of things, including how to manage shared family summer homes when the adult children and the grandchildren of the original owners have very different interests in the property and very different economic and economic capacities and skills that they can bring to sustaining the property, which actually turns out to be a complex issue on which many books have been written. And I was opining on these and Ned was reading the books, which was so typical of him. He came to the argument with expertise and I often didn't. We also spent a lot of time discussing alternative financial models for elite institutions of higher education in a world in which federal research spending is declining, tuition increases are limited by slow growth of incomes and growing student aid policies and endowments aren't increasing the way they did before. Everybody got wise about the modern way to invest. It seemed to me that there was no the answer to no interesting public policy question that Ned couldn't add value to. He was a natural teacher as many of you know and extremely generous with his time to his colleagues. I mean the amount of time he spent commenting on papers or advising you on research outlines was just amazing. But what always impressed me most about Ned is you had this guy who was very sophisticated methodologically and very well trained who could have easily gone off and been great theoretical contributor to the field but what he wanted to do was make a difference in policy and policies that were practical that were politically viable were implementable and that's what students at Michigan I think are striving for CBO has been applying. Now I had assumed that since I was listed last I would be last and everything worth saying would have been said at least twice and probably three times before I came up and if I had thought of something new and different from what they were going to say it would probably be wrong so I should probably keep my mouth shut but then I listened to them and I realized I learned a whole lot I thought I'm the only Democrat on this list I think but not appeal to your your sympathies I mean we're talking about the underprivileged I realized that I really did learn something I learned from Doug that the Republicans are going to win the Senate right and I learned from June that you know wage and price indexing are still an issue that we're going to resolve in the future a lot of people be interested in that but what I thought I would do since I didn't want to repeat them is just add a little color by looking back rather than forward to the period where Ned was Rudy's deputy and then acting director and reflect on the differences and the similarities in the budget world at that time and of course the most stark difference then versus now is that then we had a political system which while it wasn't without its frictions as Rudy has mentioned was not totally dysfunctional and we have a totally dysfunctional political system now and it was able to pass important legislation some wise, some not so wise that was then signed by the president we had the fix to Graham Rudman we had the tax reform act of 1986 we had budget resolutions that actually passed they didn't pass on time but they still were passed before the fiscal year ended which is always nice there wasn't a huge amount of harmony and there's certain similarities in the three years there you know, 86, 7 and 8 absolutely no appropriation bill was passed before the fiscal year began so that's similar to the world in which we are now in there were government shutdowns there were two government shutdowns in that period people forget this, 86 and 87 but they were short three days each most of the days were over the weekend so there wasn't huge disruption one way or another these were the days of as Rudy said, the Graham Rudman Hollings sequestration I was rummaging around in my shelves in my office and I came across the office in management and budget and congressional budget office joint sequestration report signed by Ned and Jim Miller the third goes through all of the accounts that we have here and shows you that the 19% non-defense discretionary across the board cut took $3.4 million out of CBOs $17.8 million budget and a proportional amount out of it of course it never went into effect but I'm actually going to an antiques road right after this if I don't get a better offer I actually have the one you signed too but as Rudy said we had a system it was crazy I've written a couple of papers that suggest that a lot of the criticism of Graham Rudman Hollings is sort of overstated because it did moderate the growth of discretionary spending rather significantly from the trend line that it was on even though with very few instances that it or the BEA have a direct impact so what's another difference between then and now I think we were a lot more innocent about the future back then CBO did projections that were five years long OMB did too CBO didn't do its multi-decade long-term projections and the baby boom's retirement was still a quarter of a century away so we weren't obsessed with that I mean the assumption was that in the meantime in the not too distant future something will happen we had a new tax structure that I think people thought maybe would lead to incentives that helped the economy and thereby generated more revenue rather than that we would be into a decade of undoing squashing whatever affects those incentives might have it strikes me that you know we didn't have a consensus on policies that would get us out of this problem because we weren't looking at the long run future now we do it's the expert elite in the country I think is pretty much on the same page of the exact policies but of here's two or three approaches but the probability of our political system responding to that is as close to zero as one can find and hope as I do that Rudy is right you know the fact of the matter is when you have a relatively narrow balance of power between the two parties and the almost and a change in communication which allows through modern media this information to get out rapidly strong views to be shared even if they're by small groups of people they can appear to be like a wave the perception by politicians is that if you are strong if you are courageous as Rudy said you'll also be gone at the next election and that certainly has been the recent historical truth and so I think if we want to talk about the future of fiscal and budgetary policy you probably need political scientists and psychologists up here not former CBO directors cherry nose can we go now no, no, not yet so I have some questions I'd like to ask all of you but do you want to start your questions or comments for each other that you'd like to dive in with or can I ask so the first thing I was going to ask is you all talked a little bit about the views of legislators and their willingness to compromise and their but can we talk a little bit about the views of their constituents which goes to this question about how brave they would have to be so we know that the basic arithmetic of the budget is that to put the federal budget on a sustainable path we will need to either cut current law benefits from the largest most popular benefit programs or raise taxes notably above their historical share of GDP or both but if you ask people regular people not CBO directors what they like about the government they want to keep the big benefit programs they want to keep taxes low they want to make the cuts some other place but the other places as we know don't have the money that is needed so what is it that could change that what element of that of those basic pieces will voters ultimately to support will they actually support cuts in social security and medical benefits relative to current law recognizing there may be higher benefits than people are getting actually getting today will they be willing to raise taxes above their historical share of GDP if you can't do either of those things then you can't solve the problem if they're described if they're described simply as cuts people will say no but I've suggested when anybody has asked me I think it would be more useful if people saw what monthly benefits or annual benefits would look like under different schemes and you can do it in like current dollars so that it's something that people can understand it would enable people to understand what's actually happening because it's none of the proposals would slash benefits to such an extent that people is what people imagine they would be cut to most of them in most cases they would be going up if they were adjusted in today's dollars but they have to get maybe gifted writers or cartoonists or somebody who could portray what the policy is exactly so that people will know is this a terrible idea or is it good and what the benefits would be otherwise to the economy people might not be enchanted by benefits to the economy but some of them would be but you also have to convince them that doing nothing is going to create harm they basically you look around and you say no what's the problem the problem is we need to invest in a sector the problem is one that's going to be solved by making the deficit worse but the other thing as Doug mentioned the real cliff that's embedded in the current social security law when the fund is exhausted it's a huge cut it's not a bigger cut than any of their proposals well there have been other countries where they have turned it around they maybe had advantages over what we have done but if you take my home country of Canada they did totally turn around public opinion in the mid they did turn around public opinion in the mid 1990s from a situation where the public was cheering on spending to one where it's really hard for a political party to advocate anything other than a balanced budget these days if you talk to politicians up there as to how they did it they had an argument that we don't have because the fed people here are keeping interest rates so low but they they reached a situation where interest was absorbing 40% of their revenues and the politicians of both parties made a big deal of this that it wasn't great to borrow under those circumstances so what we really need is a big increase in interest rates you've had people you came to the right place so a couple of thoughts first I think that's too strong one of the things that I've fallen in love with which I love the story about Ned and the CRA asking the examiners what the truth was I think it's very useful to ask people so I now spend a lot more money on polls in my think tank and it turns out that if you ask people you don't get the caricature that you would suggest the most recent example this is actually an immigration reform it's not a budget issue where we polled Steve King's district and his constituents would say the system's broken these policy issues but most importantly they would say I will vote for someone with whom I disagree on immigration they're not going to lose their job and this has come through in polling we've done in Medicare reform so security reform as well so I think the notion that there's this automatic punishment is overstated on the ground it doesn't look like it's there second point is it does matter how you frame it if you just say without saying because the alternative is this dangerous path which will harm your children and their children and the children thereafter where the Pentagon says that this large amount of debt and our trajectory is our single greatest national security concern if you frame it with the counterfactual being something important you get different answers there's no doubt about it so they need to be educated which is the third point when elections do in the United States they are the moments of public education it's very difficult to get people to correctly difficult to stop paying attention to all the things in their lives and worry about Medicare reform they don't do that I'm sure you've had this experience I gave lots of speeches when I was a CBO director and I remember going to the Dallas Morning Club explaining how the world was going to end and they were outraged and they said why haven't you said this when elections instead of saying to people he wants to cut Medicare and portraying this and she's very tough she comes back every election it's going to have to be a genuine conversation about how we're going to have to change Medicare and the only question is how and the numbers are getting the point where it has to happen so I think that's optimistic and the last point is we're going to get the test case we're going to get the trigger going to bankrupt in two years and so we're going to have a relatively small but important entitlement that's going to need some fixing and so we'll see how it plays out I'm going to come back on my blog or my thing that I'm going to say and he just told you that Medicare is going down the tubes and we've got to do something about it did you know that in 2012 per beneficiary Medicare spending in nominal terms rose by four tenths of a percentage point and in 2013 it was flat zero and you know I can tell you why that's all irrelevant and all like that but my guess is there's more people out there willing to listen to that message than to your message I want to just say one thing Bob Avery to make him feel a little better well I mean he told the story about Ned kicking him under the table and it was because Ned fell asleep and I thought that's pretty damaging to your ego you're talking and your boss falls asleep because he thinks it's so boring Ned as some of you might know Bruce certainly does fell asleep at exciting times too and I have a story on that he and I were out in Los Angeles I think it was a RAND conference and we left the motel to go to the dinner and he had rented a car and we're going down the expressway at 65 miles an hour and you know the car begins going over the side and I said Ned drive like that going over the side again and then suddenly he just drove over to the breakdown lane and he got up and he said you drive I'm going to fall asleep and it was pretty exciting and he said wake me up when we get to the restaurant which is what I did Bob your comment was you talk to people about the budget they say well that's not the biggest problem they're worried about unemployment they're worried about something else I'm going to ask all of you a sacrilegious question coming from director of the congressional budget office because as Doug noted our job is to wake up worrying about the budget but have policy makers devoted the right amount of attention to the budget deficit and projections of the deficit and debt over the last few years because the question is put to me is put to me often in the form well the deficit is not the biggest problem they make much progress on it and the focus on it has crowded out policy makers attention to a whole set of other issues on which progress might have been made so my answer of course is I don't make policy recommendations being a CBO director so I don't have to tell them what they should focus on but what do you think more money well I'm asking you to offer your sense of this Doug testify that we've made essentially no progress on budget issues so does that mean that the time has been misspent or is it just a long process and you spend a lot of time talking about it and educating people and that's what we've been through in the past few years I think it's a little of both to be honest one of the problems has been that we had this tremendous success in the late 90s and many people thought we'll just do that again we went from deficits to surpluses and the difficulty was we also had a productivity boom we didn't know where it came from and the revenue just roared in the baby boom was 25 years away from retiring we had discretionary spending is the dominant part of the budget and you could put the caps on there and we got a piece to help smooth out everything and that's all gone but we ran the same playbook we have this discretionary focus in a different environment and so that's the part that was misspent we finally got their attention they paid attention to the budget they look at the history and they misapplied it and that happens then there was the what I think the productive laying the groundwork was through things like not because you might like the Paul Ryan budget at the house but because of its focus people really did have to come to terms with what do we think about when we think about really doing tax reform what do we think about when we think about the mandatory spending programs by the time they got to that they were so exhausted they didn't do anything with it but I don't think that was time that was misspent really I don't it's just that we started off in the wrong direction Bob mentioned all the things that have changed over the decades since I was at CBO certainly but I think one of the frustrations I had already which has gotten a lot worse is that frankly it was very hard to get a congressman to focus on policy issues in private conversation they were so darn busy raising money that they really had not all that much time to contemplate policy issues and I think that's a lot worse now that the amount of time they actually spent thinking about policy is just a limited portion of their day do you mean the difference between budget issues and other things like the thing that always bugs me is when someone says I can bring you jobs well members of congress I I mean they might be able to create an atmosphere where jobs would be created better but nobody really knows how to how to do it's that's something that really has to emanate from the private sector you have to have sort of an atmosphere an economic atmosphere where individuals who are who can have businesses feel it's to their advantage to start businesses and but there's nothing there's no act that congress can pass I don't think that can make that happen so and as Doug said the seamy days of the 90s were entirely and actually there was one reason why the CBO forecast was wrong every year we never were always behind because we didn't imagine that year after year the market would go up and up and up and would bring in tons of revenues and another thing is once we got the surplus it turned out I think to be more ruinous than the opposite because you know it was just spending like crazy on programs that you then can't just shut off so I never had that experience every time I took in Washington we had a recession and went to war in the Middle East so now we know what the solution is do we have to go to California? so let me ask one last thing and then we'll throw it open to all of you to ask questions I'm wondering what your perspectives are on the role of objective information on the sort of research that Ned did that you folks have done the role of that in policymaking so one view that I hear is that it is less useful than it used to be because there is this a more entrenched partisan divide more people listen to the TV station or radio station or look at the cable news site of their choice so that there's a greater drumbeat of non-objective information and thus the sort of objective research that we do and that Ned did is less important there's also a view that I hear that well particularly in an environment where much of what is coming across the airwaves and across our computer screens and phone screens and so on is not real analysis that makes the analysis even more important than it used to be do you have a sense of that how we all could make this research this policy research more relevant than it is this is a true story this constitutes minor confession I left Columbia I got a job at Columbia University and I taught there for three years and I published in places that you these weird exotic journals that you can't find on newsstands that seem to go off into this nether world and I watched, you know, I taught my classes and watched my students arrange their social lives in front of me pretty indifferent to what I was saying and I got seriously depressed about whether I chose in the right profession was there any social value to this at all so in crisis you always go home so I'm back to Princeton for a year and then my advisors had genuinely been life crises and they went off to Washington and I followed them Harvey Rosen and John Taylor and I never intended to go back to academia but I thought I've had it this is a pointless exercise and the production of this research was not worth it and then I found out was at the White House people could and did say anything in the pursuit of their favorite policies you know, if you cut the capital gains tax rate we will never have teen pregnancy again I'm sure of it and I learned that the only check on this was not any single paper but was the vast accumulation of genuine serious research which could not tell you the answer but could tell you definitively many things were not the answer and could give you the boundaries of what effective policies might be it was the most important thing that I learned there and it renewed my faith and the entire enterprise went back to Syracuse for a long time and I think about that a lot because it's still true you know, I know there's a lot of competitor information out there that isn't as good but it is what the foundation of the policy process and I think that the second lesson I've learned over time is these high quality productions do not sell themselves and we have to be better at communicating them and there's no doubt about that that the, in the end what I've learned is that you have to make good policy, good politics and you have to be able to talk in English to non-specialists cognizant of the political environment for that research to have a voice and that becomes the challenge and so the stakes have been raised but I don't think they've been raised by the competitor research it's about conveying in a very noisy environment what your research says huge optimist on this dimension and I think there's been fundamental transformation over the last 30 years and what people who question the impact of policy research, objective policy research don't understand is that its main contribution is to stop bad things from happening and a whole lot of bad things have been stopped and I used to people say what is CBO and I said well CBO really is a speed bump on the road of fiscal irresponsibility that you know if you choose to drive your car 100 miles an hour you can, no one's going to stop you you're going to have to replace the springs and the brakes and everything else a lot sooner but the amount of stuff that CBO stops when they do an informal cost estimate for some member who has a great idea in his head and it's very attractive politically is really quite substantial but the other thing that's happened is we have people the media the elite media, the New York Times you know even the CNNs of the world with wannabe analysts who can judge good stuff from bad stuff who appreciate their contacts with people in places like the like CBO and analytical departments everywhere I mean I spent a huge amount of time and I'm sure all of you did talking to people in the press not for quotation but sort of like you know I have this study that says you know the sky's going to fall tomorrow and this woman says the sea's going to dry up you know what was the right story and walk me through it and then they're very appreciative because they seem so smart afterwards and you know if you take a newspaper an elite newspaper from 25 years ago versus now and look and see what's in it I mean they all have health sections and the health sections are all reporting you know summaries that are really well written about what's in JAMA and various medical and New England Journal of Medicine bringing information forward that educates the public and so I think this is all well worth it and coming back to Ned Ned was sort of uniquely capable of taking complex ideas and explaining them to people who are interested but have no real expertise and he was a great sort of teacher and communicator in that and you know a lot of people have talked about this book he wrote you know 100 pages long and yet you know it can be understood by anybody it has all the right messages coming through so I you know more I think all of that is true but I also think that we policy analysts should put a dose of modesty into what we do policy analysis is a science of sorts but it's also a lot of art too and we do know that very good conservative economists looking at something like the employment effect of the minimum wage will come out with a different answer than very good liberal economists and it's pretty predictable so the Congress gets a lot of very different views that appear to be scientifically based now the science does restrict the range of views that's a good thing about it but I always look at it like the various expert witnesses you have in some court cases where the jury has to decide between one or the other so I don't think we should get too arrogant about all of this but again I return to the point that the science at least restricts the range of output outcomes, CBO always takes something in the middle there somewhere but the standard deviation can be very large and at the bottom of it all when it comes to things like macro forecasting or revenue forecasting unfortunately we're not very good at it within economics the statistical analysis that has become much more complex so the average individual and the average economist may find many articles inaccessible that may be dealing with very important issues and they may have a very good way of doing it but it's just not something that's accessible so you do need some sort of intermediaries like a CBO who can read the articles and explain what it is that they're saying and it's hard to say well evaluate like the minimum wage studies are a good example although there I strongly believe that demand curves are downward sloping so I always reject something that suggests otherwise but the but the statistic that is a barrier and I think to get hired in universities you have to demonstrate that you can do these do very complex statistical kinds of analysis Sonic and that way Bob your point about the reporters who are going to work on this who are the five people I had to talk to you know I don't understand what these issues are and and that's all just a legacy of having gotten to know them at some point during this process okay I think that's a good point I think that's a good point I think that's a good point I think that's a good point I think that's a good point I think that's a good point okay so your turn what questions would you like to put to the folks up here I have more if you don't ask any but it really is time for you all Gene so since we have a current and all these former CBO directors be curious what you think CBO could do better and you can add the caveat if it had the additional resources Doug and I have an ongoing conversation about are there ways to put together packages for instance of changes as opposed to one at a time that might say solve problems like regressivity which shouldn't be the only criteria you can make something progressive by combining two things together or should they be doing more graphics we tried to help them out by making them understand the importance about graphics by hiring away one of their top graphics or person thanks for your help Gene but I'd be very curious among you there what are the things in your ideal world do you think CBO could perhaps do better you have to all have to talk and I'll take notes what are the things with a limited amount of time it really is a huge array of topics it's really very hard it's hard for me to think of anything and I think that CBO has done better you've put out this huge volume of material I mean maybe it could be better sifted through if you wanted to draw people's attention to some things rather than other things because I was hunting for something in the CBO website and I knew that I'd seen it but I couldn't remember where I saw well CBO does have to be careful not to do too much they're not asked for from the congress I mean they tread dangerous ground if they analyze policies that nobody wants analyzed but I'm glad you mentioned the website I have a lot of comments about that you have a lot of paper I think well Jean and I have often discussed different ways of displaying budget data which shouldn't get them into trouble but things like a sources and uses of funds table that just in nominal terms showed where the money comes from well where the increase in revenues every year and in borrowing is allocated to various mandatory programs and discretionary programs and so forth I think would show more clearly the results as Jean would say of the laws passed by dead men long ago on a more equal basis with the discretionary spending I think right now the playing field is so uneven between the discretionary accounts and the entitlement accounts where the latter are not looked at and the built in growth is accepted as a baseline when you really don't have to do that there are other ways of displaying it not complaining about how you display it now is more suggesting alternative ways of looking at it you have any suggestions for a thought? okay other questions yes sir I'm curious about the interrelationship with OMB and CBO and how often you interact with things and is it congenial, is it conflicting is it overlapping I think the answer is it depends a lot on the era I was at CBO at a time when they had given up all pretence of physical discipline there were no big disagreements that mattered on how you scored things we weren't going to run up against a cap we weren't going to have a grammar and homing enforcement mechanism when those are in place as they were during the tenures of someone to my left year CBO could get in more conflict I had a very benign period and it was characterised largely by staff level conspiracy to make sure that I didn't know what was going on and Mitch Daniels didn't know what was going on it was all good the Clinton healthcare proposal and we were developing a lot of models we were developing a lot of data they were as well at the staff level and a few times I was involved in this our people would meet informally and very collegially to make sure the other side knew what not the other side but I mean what they knew what we were doing and they were a little more reticent to show us what they were doing but you know we were different on certain things and for a highly contentious issue it was a constructive relationship when I came to CBO there was in fact very little discussion between OMB and CBO on particular things even when there was disagreements about outlay rates or cost estimates the one good thing that I think Graham Rudman really did it forced us to work together and it forced the staff to work together and as Bob said I think in that time period we developed collegial relationships and learned a lot from each other especially identifying differences in assumptions for cost estimates and so forth in the mid 90's that was when Clinton was president and Newt Gingrich was running the show there was a budget impasse you know there were the shutdowns and a snowstorm which made it seem that the shutdowns were even longer but it was shut down because of the snow but anyway it looked like no budget would be passed the complaint was that the CBO estimates Clinton complained that the CBO estimates were faulty and he said the suggestion was made that we ought to have sort of a general meeting of the economists from the White House it wasn't OMB but the economists from the White House with the economists at CBO and we didn't meet it was a perfectly cordial meeting you know all the main guys were there there was Joe Stiglitz and Larry Summers and we talked about different things they were also pondering how significant is what are we missing in productivity growth and then we went about and did a new forecast but the other thing that happened it's a little reminiscent of the period today weather wise the weather was terrible which I think had really slowed growth during the winter in the 90s and come the spring I had a feeling that the thing would improve anyway but so we did a new forecast and the new forecast was somewhat more optimistic than the old one it ended everything the White House accepted our numbers and we went along and then it became unnecessary because the economy was booming knowing it was completely about the growth in the economy and actually one funny thing is when it started out one of the disagreements was the contract for America said the budget would be balanced in seven years and Clinton came back so that would be inhumane we couldn't have anything to achieve a balanced budget in seven years would cause such draconian cuts that couldn't be done and then of course the budget there was a surplus within three years which just goes to show over the years as CBO's reputation has risen increasingly you have gotten people at the secretarial level and the high level political appointees in the situation where when CBO comes out with something that's very different from what their staff has done they ask their staff what's the difference and so I think there's more communication at a low level as things go on sort of where are you on this higher or lower than this I mean nobody puts their cards on the table but there's relationships that are developed and sort of an understanding of nobody wants surprises and the estimates and forecasts have converged as well I mean during my time there we were contending with the so called Reagan-Rosie scenarios big differences in the short run forecasts but the press tended to side with us on the debates that ensued and I think over the years as a result of that administrations have been much more reluctant to diverge from the consensus kind of estimate which is the kind of estimate that CBO is likely to put for it I would just add in the current era the analysts at CBO are in interact with counterparts at OMB and in the press agencies that are implementing the programs they're studying but we have very limited next to no contact at a senior level I don't talk to the OMB director because I think there is a risk of looking like we are collaborating in some way and I'm given the current level of distrust among the folks I work for that seems like a risk not worth taking other questions David so the CBO itself was important institutional innovation in the mid-1970s one thing I talked with Ned about quite a bit was whether there were other potential institutional innovations I sort of doubt that we've arrived at the end state the best answer about fiscal institutions in the United States and I'm curious for your thoughts about potential physical institutions that might improve the state of policymaking in the United States today so I have reluctantly after years of opposition come around to the notion that we may want to move to something that has a budget resolution signed by the president call it whatever you want the reality is that the federal government doesn't have a budget the president has his proposals the house sometimes passes a budget resolution the senate sometimes passes a budget resolution they sometimes conference and agree but never do all three parties get on the same page never is there a comprehensive plan for what you'll spend discretionary and mandatory to borrow what you'll raise in taxes it just doesn't exist so we don't have fiscal policy we have fiscal outcomes usually bad and I can tell you a million reasons why this is a bad idea that it would force people to talk to each other again which I think is a good idea and it would force us to actually come in terms of the plan so you write down a budget every year or every other year take your pick the house passes it the senate passes it and the president signs it you have to have that before you can do any appropriations but that's all he does and then what it's dead on arrival you hear that you read the first words dead on arrival doesn't matter house passes its budget dead on arrival in the senate senate may or may not pass its budget never do all three there's nothing that forces all three have a fallback of some kind that something automatically becomes the top of the year what are we going to do I'm with you there are a thousand reasons why this might not work but we need something when you have different parties in the two houses it makes it much more difficult if one is republican and one is democratic I was there when they were all republicans it was still pretty difficult okay other questions yes a little in the back well so I can say what we've done recently so on your first topics we publish a report every year about the distribution of income and taxes paid and last fall we for the first time also published the distribution of federal spending so you can look at the federal spending and taxes together and get a sense of the overall impact on the federal budget on the distribution of income on climate change we've done a succession of work over the last decade or a dozen years or so that has really done a terrific job of analyzing a set of alternative policies and their consequences for economic growth for distribution of well-being as well as for the federal budget on social security I would say again if you can find your way through our website there's a very nice report analyzing collection of options for dealing with social security as you know we don't make recommendations we just present the menu we offer the menu we don't tell you well tonight the chicken is especially good but that is one of the options and we look at the effects not only on the federal budget but also on the effects on the benefits received and taxes paid by people born in different generations and with different levels of income during their lifetimes I mean there's a lot of simple answers to these questions and they tend to be politically unacceptable you know I don't think raising a tax cap will get you there but you know it'll get you a long way there and the downside of that is there are not many people who would sign on to it and there's a crucial question of whether you continue to compute benefits the way you do now and a lot of strong advocates of the social security system think that if you broke the relationship between taxes paid and benefits earned as it were that that would hurt the political strength of the system okay Jim CPO has stood for two propositions that are propositions that economics stands for also which is that policies have incentive effects and that there's a budget constraint and these two propositions tend to make CPO the bad guy in most policy discussions query is that inevitable I mean are you guys just the bad guys and is there a way to make yourself the good guys and if so would then the message be more effective or is that just true I think you're the bad guy I mean as you know I spent two years of my life on the McCain campaign and there is nothing more unpleasant than being the policy person on a political campaign because it's your job to say things like well that's not true or you can't say that and they hate you I mean they just hate you and so yeah they're always going to be the bad guy because they are you know all you can do is try to ameliorate it by saying look sir I know you're the politician and I'm the policy analyst here's what I know about this you're now informed you know you're an adult with an armed gun go do what you want to do but this is what you're about to say but you're the bad guy no doubt about it I'm surprised that you think that CBO is now considered a bad guy from where I sit usually I mean in the press CBO is considered god like the word of CBO it's like Moses I know some of that's artificial too I always thought one of my roles I don't know how the others feel about it you have this psychosocial being the person they can blame for their troubles and they vent and scream and yell and lie a lot about how CBO didn't have the scores done on time oh Congress doesn't you get called by members committee chairs and things like that excoriating you for what has happened and then you run into the person in some less heated environment and they say I'm so thankful for CBO you know it's like a kid blowing up but then realizing that boundaries have to be set most of these individuals they're smart they're capable and they're appreciative of what CBO does I think and one of the interesting things going on now is that you're having many CBOs pop up all over the world even in Westminster parliamentary systems where you wouldn't think they would have that bigger role but there's a new relatively new one in Canada now that serves the parliament and makes them because in a parliamentary system the minority has a terrible time getting any information at all and then CBO type organization does provide them with some expertise people come to visit us from other countries to talk about how they might set up institutions like ours from Australia for example we were visited by a delegation of people in the parliamentary majority on a different occasion delegation of people in the parliamentary minority both trying to understand how if they adopted something like CBO it would work Bob Sunshine who's a deputy director and is here in the front has gone to conferences in other countries and explains how we do what we do now we're forced to confess that it's not like US fiscal policy has turned out all that impressively so you shouldn't think this well that's the point which is that having an organization like CBO or organization like CBO is not having a magic wand to solve your budget problems but I do think very strongly that the absence of an organization that can produce objective numbers would make the current situation far far worse I think since I am currently working for the congress I think I will not offer any further characterization of my relationship with them to wait for my memoirs maybe we have time for one more quick question please CBO has very good information on the budget allocations of the federal government but of course there's a lot of other governments that are spending a lot of money in the United States and they have implications for as we've already talked about fiscal policy as well as many other policy issues that Ned was interested in is there any interest among members of congress to have CBO do more to sort of upgrade the quality of the information that we have about state and local government budgets so that question is asked occasionally and our answer is simply we study the federal budget and I think there are organizations in states some of greater strength than others that do analysis someone analogous to what CBO does I think we don't have and we've done a little work in that area we've looked at state and local pensions a bit we look obviously at the states side of the programs that are shared with the federal government so we talked to some extent about how Medicaid changes will affect the states but that would be a huge project well beyond what we could possibly achieve in the current situation okay so we've come to 515 and we should stop here and I don't know if Susan or Paul have more to say at this point thank you all very much but pickly challenging issues I think and many of you who are here knew Ned much better than I did but I suspect that if he were here he would tell us that we've got a lot of work to do and it's time for us to roll up our sleeves but as Sheldon said in the very first panel we've got a lot of work to do and that's our optimism and so with that I'd like to particularly thank Ruth Gramlich for joining us for today as well as a number of the members of the Gramlich family I'd also like to thank our hosts the Federal Reserve it's been wonderful to work with them and we really appreciate all of the hospitality and the partnership and I wanted to particularly express appreciation for the great work that they did to have everything go so smoothly and then last but not least in addition to thanking you our audience for joining us I wanted to ask all of you to join me in a round of applause to thank our moderators and all of the panelists for the entire session so thank you very very much there is a reception and I invite you to stay