If the company's projection proves correct, growth will be nearly cut in half this year.
If Rogers' projection proves optimistic as merger projections often do, Primedia investors will be even more in the hole.
Should the projection prove accurate, it would mark the lowest annual growth for holiday retail sales since 2002.
If Elmendorf's projection proves true, the sequester could cost the U.S. more than four times the amount of jobs it gained last month in one swoop.
And if the surplus projections proved to be overly optimistic, the country would be saved from painful economic choices.
Although harshly criticized at the time by the utility industry, his projections proved more prescient than the conventional ones.
The remaining $600 billion would probably be too little to pay for the other initiatives that the two parties are considering, Democrats said, especially if the surplus projections proved to be too high.
Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning research group, said there was a real risk of a "feeding frenzy" on tax cuts that dissipated the surplus and even, if the projections proved faulty, created new deficits.
But the projections proved inaccurate and ethanol producers made only negligible amounts of the cellulosic fuel.
The mass loss of U.S. competitiveness that would occur if the CBO health care expense projections proved true would mean that the CBO budget projections would be wildly over-optimistic.
