Health Care Reform Update

The big news yesterday was the daylong summit between President Obama and several members of both major parties from the House and Senate, including party leadership from both houses. While it's best to leave discussion of the summit's political and legislative consequences to strategists and pundits, it is worth taking a quick look at some of the more recent analyses of this important issue.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) has created a good introductory report providing an overview of some of the salient health care reform issues here (PDF); it is six months old but still very relevant. CRS doesn't make their reports public, but many organizations collect these reports and make them available. Students can use Open CRS as a gateway to search for more reports from the CRS on health care reform.

After reading through the above report, another indispensable resource is the Kaiser Family Foundation's page on reform proposals. It allows the user to make easy side-by-side comparisons of two or more proposals, including the House bill, the Senate bill, the White House proposal, and many of the previous proposals.

Lastly, students looking for more in-depth analysis and information can browse the Congressional Budget Office's regularly updated catalog of health care reform-related reports.

Critiquing Macroeconomic Policy

Macroeconomic policy tools are those that allow the world's governments and central bankers to manage national economies. These include monetary policy - which means controlling a nation's money supply through interest rate adjustments, for example - and fiscal policy, which includes tax and expenditure changes like stimulus packages.

The recent financial crisis has many economists re-thinking the conventional wisdom on many of these topics. A good, concise, and highly readable example of these critiques is this policy note (PDF) recently released by the International Monetary Fund. The report reads:

It was tempting for macroeconomists and policymakers alike to take much of the credit for the steady decrease in cyclical fluctuations from the early 1980s on and to conclude that we knew how to conduct macroeconomic policy. We did not resist temptation. The crisis clearly forces us to question our earlier assessment.

This is what this paper tries to do. It proceeds in three steps. The first reviews what we thought we knew. The second identifies where we were wrong. The third, and the most tentative of the three, takes a first pass at the contours of a new macroeconomic policy framework.

It's a good resource for students interested in these issues.

School Lunch Policies and Nutrition

There's been an ongoing focus of childhood obesity in the U.S., and school lunches can play a role in improving it. A recent report by the Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service studied the effects that school lunch policies can have on food nutrition value, dividing schools into categories based on fat content of meals. The report found:

The fat content of school lunches was statistically correlated with many school policies and characteristics in the spring of 2005. Some policies and practices, such as whether french fries are regularly served, can directly affect the nutritional content of USDA lunches. Other policies, such as a school’s allowance of “competitive” foods or foods that bypass nutritional standards, can indirectly affect the content of USDA lunches by offering choices that appeal to students’ taste preferences.

The entire report can be read here.

Economic Report of the President

One of the most interesting documents produced by the Executive Branch every year is the Economic Report of the President, which comes out up to ten days after submission of the budget (which we talked about here and here).

The report is essentially an annual overview of economic activity and policy from the previous year, as well as a statement of political principles and priorities from the administration. A more specific list of some of the things included, provided by the Government Printing Office, includes:

• Current and foreseeable trends and annual numerical goals concerning topics such as employment, production, real income and Federal budget outlays.
• Employment objectives for significant groups of the labor force.
• Annual numeric goals.
• A program for carrying out program objectives.

The 2010 report was just released yesterday by the Obama Administration, and can be read or downloaded in a variety of formats here. The report provides a wealth of information and data about the nation's economic activity, and is useful for students trying to develop an understanding of the state of the economy and the nature of the economic downturn.

Previous reports, for every year beginning in 1947, are available via the St. Louis Federal Reserve website.

FY 2011 Budget Proposal: A Guided Tour

Few things receive as much attention - or have such a broad impact on the nation - as the annual federal budgeting process. With yesterday's budget release, noted here, the annual process begins anew.

It's a complex process with significant moving parts, of which the President's budget proposal is the first step, so here are a few resources for students trying to make sense of it.

• The Congressional Research Service has produced a must-read introductory report on the budget process, available here in PDF.
• In the Executive Branch, the Office of Management and Budget is the lead office on developing the budget proposal.
  
• The President proposes the budget, but Congress must approve or modify the President's request. The key committees are the House and Senate budget committees, which create the initial budget resolution to serve as a budgeting blueprint; and the House and Senate appropriations committees, which actually appropriate funding.
  
• Congress doesn't approve the President's budget as one document. Instead, it divides spending by subject into twelve different appropriations bills, which can be passed individually or combined into omnibus bills.
• The Library of Congress keeps track of each spending bill. This link shows spending bills from last year (FY 2010). The library will update its site when the current (FY 2011) appropriations bills are devised and move forward.

Finally, there are several places to find detailed information about the budget proposal.

• The Office of Management and Budget provides an overview and summaries of the budget requests for each department here.
• Individual departments and agencies provide much more detailed budget information. For example, see Commerce; Energy; Veterans Affairs; State; as well as individual agencies like NASA; the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission; the Small Business Administration; and many others.
• Finally, a good resource for budget analysis is the Congressional Budget Office.
  

Predident's Budget of the U.S. Government , FY 2011

is now available from the U.S. GPO: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/home.action. The online PDF versions of the FY 2011 budget are digitally signed and certified in order to assure users of the authenticity of the documents.