Budgetary and Economic Outcomes Under Paths for Federal Revenues and Noninterest Spending Specified in the Conference Report on the 2016 Budget Resolution

At the request of the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Senator Mike Enzi, and the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Congressman Tom Price, the Congressional Budget Office has projected budgetary and economic outcomes over the 2016 2025 period assuming certain paths for federal revenues and spending excluding interest payments. Those paths are consistent with the amounts of overall revenues and spending specified in the conference report on the 2016 budget resolution S. Con. Res. 11, which was filed on April 29, 2015. However, the projections do not represent a cost estimate for legislation or an analysis of the effects of any specific policies that might be adopted to produce the revenue and spending paths anticipated in the resolution. The specified paths envision cuts in spending from the amounts projected to occur under current law that begin in 2016 and grow successively larger in later years. The paths also envision allowing revenues to rise roughly as projected under current law over the next decade. Under those paths, the cumulative deficit over the 2016 2025 period, excluding interest savings and macroeconomic effects, would be roughly 5 trillion lower than in CBO s current-law baseline, as adjusted to reflect recently enacted legislation.3 The projections in this report represent CBO s assessment of how federal debt and economic output would evolve from 2016 to 2025 under those specified paths for revenues and noninterest spending. The projections show how the total amounts of federal revenues and spending and the resulting amount of federal borrowing under those paths would affect the economy and how those macroeconomic effects or feedback in turn would affect the federal budget.