CRFB spreadsheet here for now; to be updated.
Figure 1: CBO GDP projection from January 2025 (black), implied CEA June forecast (blue), both in bn.Ch.2017$, by fiscal year. Source: CRFB.
A quarterly look at the CEA implied forecast calculated by me here.
The difference between the two seems to be attributable to the faster growth CRFB attributed to the CEA’s near term growth, than mine where I distributed evenly growth.
you all need to be very aware of the racist redistricting of texas. not only has gov abbott violated houston by not providing an election to fill the vacant seat due to the death of Sylvester turner. the state is now ramming through redistricting that will eliminate several house seats that were in minority populated hispanic and black areas. those have been gerrymandered into republican districts, and will give republicans several new seats in the house. so about a million minorities will have their votes silenced with this move. and trump will solidify his hold on the country. trump and republicans are not worried about the sanctity of the peoples vote. they have no problem silencing those voices. people like rick stryker and bruce hall support these illegal assaults on a working democracy. sad.
“There’s no federal law that prohibits states from redrawing district maps midcycle, said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s civil rights division. Laws around the timing to redraw congressional and state district maps vary by state. In Texas, the state constitution doesn’t specify timing, so the redrawing of maps is left to the discretion of the governor and the Legislature.”
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/11/texas-congress-midcycle-redistricting-trump-republicans/
If Texas does it, so will other states. The long tradition of redistricting only in response to the decennial census will be violated and voting districts can change whenever one party or the other has enough votes in a state legislature to disenfranchise voters of the other party. The Supreme Court mostly rejects obvious racially-based gerrymandering, but has allowed elections to go ahead based on rejected maps; show up late enough in the election cycle and you get a pass.
Also, our current Supreme Court is not like earlier courts. This Court has, for instance, overturned longstanding Court precedent based on the views of a 17th century English witch hunter. Never seen that before.
Off topic – In March of last year, Menzie noted the felon-in-chief saying he might want to gut Social Security:
https://econbrowser.com/archives/2024/03/and-so-it-begins
Turns out, his Treasury Secretary is on board with that:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/30/bessent-trump-accounts-backdoor-privatize-social-security-00484859
The White House quickly tried to paper over what Bessent said:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/leavitt-cleans-bessent-social-security-185613268.html
We all know how truthful the White House is.
The Social Security Administration’s Trustees have recently calculated that benefit payments will drop to 81% of the promised level in 2034, nine years from now, if no effort is made to shore up the tust fund. A recession between then and now would hasten the reduction in payments.
So why isn’t Congress working to increase revenues to the Social Security system? Perhaps because reducing benefits is the goal. The Republican majority is on record as wanting to raise the age at which the full benefit could be received to 69 years from the current 67:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/new-social-security-rule-proposal-would-raise-retirement-age-to-69-for-millions-of-americans/ar-AA1GnNCJ
By the way, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document also proposed raising the retirment age.
So it comes down to this: Nothing will be done to improve the finances of Social Security while the felon-in-chief is in office. That means either raising the age of full eligibility by 2 years of doing nothing while the felon is in office. If Democrats were to take the presidency and control of both chambers of Congress in 2029, they’d have a brief window to increase revenues before benefits would automatically drop.
By the way, Republican proposals often include claims that current beneficiaries or current and near-term beneficiaries would not suffer benefit cuts. That’s not how the math works. When the trust fund is depleted, benefits are cut for all recipients unless something is done legislatively – like tapping the Treasury general fund to give money to Social Security. The longer we delay, the more likely there will be across-the-board cuts.
Here’s the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget on the outlook for Social Security:
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/retirees-face-18100-benefit-cut-7-years
CRFB says cuts tobenefits will come in 7 years, not 9, and that the benefit cut will be 24%, not 19%, as claimed by the Social Security Trustees. For the average 2-income family retiring in 2033, that amounts to a benefit reduction of $18,100 in the first year. That is likely to be on top of an 11% reduction in Medicare hospital fund benefits. As I’ve noted, cuts grow larger with time, because at no point in the Social Security Administration’s 75-year forecast period are revenues as high as outlays.
Regardless of what voters may have thought, that’s what we voted for last year.