That’s the title of CEA Chair Jason Furman’s presentation at the University of Wisconsin at Madison on Monday. Introduced by UW Chancellor Becky Blank, his discussion covered a wide range of issues. From WisBusiness:

Jason Furman, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said Congress should invest in infrastructure at today’s low borrowing rates, reform the tax code, approve an immigration reform bill projected to cut the deficit and agree on long-term debt reduction, instead of implementing short-term cuts like sequestration that impede economic growth.

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From reader Hans, commenting on the advisability of the reductions in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) expenditures, effective today:

You ax nothing from the recipient and everything from the tax slave…

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(Updated with thoughts on “The Food Stamp President”)

From CBPP (10/24):

The 2009 Recovery Act’s temporary boost in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits ends on November 1, 2013, which will mean a benefit cut for each of the nearly 48 million SNAP recipients — 87 percent of whom live in households with children, seniors, or people with disabilities.

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Update, 10/20 12PM Pacific

After the failure of the Republican effort to defund the Affordable Care Act, what is the net macro effect? According the IHS-Global Insight, and S&P [1], 0.6 ppts were shaved off 2013Q4 GDP growth (SAAR). S&P puts a dollar figure to this impact — $24 billion in lost output.

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“Short-term U.S. debt prices tumbled again Tuesday amid rising investor concern about the prospect of a government-debt default, sending the yield on one-month U.S. Treasury bills to its highest level since the financial crisis.”

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(Update 10/8, 9PM)

Or think twice … thanks to the government closure.

From GovExec, “90 Percent of Seafood Imports Go Uninspected Due to Shutdown”:

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(Updated 10/6)

Four business days into the shutdown, and we have already exceeded in length 90% of the government-wide shutdowns that have occurred. What is the macro impact? In an accounting sense, by end-of-Monday, the impact should be to shave off 0.2 ppts of 2013Q4 q/q annualized growth.

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Here’s the abstract for a paper I recently completed on Off-Balance-Sheet Federal Liabilities:

Much attention has been given to the recent growth of the U.S. federal debt. This paper examines the growth of federal liabilities that are not included in the officially reported numbers. These take the form of implicit or explicit government guarantees and commitments. The five major categories surveyed include support for housing, other loan guarantees, deposit insurance, actions taken by the Federal Reserve, and government trust funds. The total dollar value of notional off-balance-sheet commitments came to $70 trillion as of 2012, or 6 times the size of the reported on-balance-sheet debt. The paper reviews the potential costs and benefits of these off-balance-sheet commitments and their role in precipitating or mitigating the financial crisis of 2008.

What follows is a brief summary of the paper.

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