We estimate that forgiving federal college student loan debt will cost between $300 billion and $980 billion over the 10-year budget window, depending on program details. About 70 percent of debt relief accrues to borrowers in the top 60 percent of the income distribution.
PWBM estimates that the Senate-passed version of the Inflation Reduction Act would reduce non-interest cumulative deficits by $264 billion over the budget window. The impact on inflation is statistically indistinguishable from zero. GDP falls slightly within the first decade while increasing slightly by 2050. Most, but not all, of the tax increases fall on higher income households.
PWBM and CBO find an almost identical impact of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (“IRA”) on the budget, with small differences stemming from the timing of the corporate minimum tax revenue. The impact on inflation is statistically indistinguishable from zero for either estimate.
PWBM estimates that the Inflation Reduction Act would reduce non-interest cumulative deficits by $248 billion over the budget window with no impact on GDP in 2031. The impact on inflation is statistically indistinguishable from zero. An illustrative scenario is also presented where Affordable Care Act subsidies are made permanent. Under this illustrative alternative, the 10-year deficit reduction estimate falls to $89 billion.
We estimate that the federal estate tax would have generated 9 times more revenue in 2019 without the tax changes in 2001 and 2017.
This legacy brief is available as a downloadable PDF.
The U.S. population’s total fertility rate is now approximately 1.7 births per female, which is below the replacement rate of 2.1 that is required for the U.S. population not to shrink without increases in immigration. Women are delaying motherhood, from the 2006 average age range of 25 to 29 to the 30 to 34 age range today.
In 2018 and 2019, age-specific mortality rates for ages 60 through 80 continued to decline by 0.5 percent annually. For the same age group, age-specific mortality increased for those without a high school diploma but decreased 2.5 percent for those with a BA or advanced degrees.
We relate the decline in the birth rate to two demographic factors closely associated with women’s fertility patterns: marriage and educational attainment. Married women are at least three percentage points more likely to have a child than unmarried women, and simultaneously marriage rates among women 25 to 29 declined 15.9 percent since 2006. Women who complete 4 years of college are less likely to have a child, while completion rates of 4 years of college rose 10 percent for women over the past decade.
