C.B.O. Cuts 2013 Deficit Estimate by 24%

In a periodic update to its projections, the office on Tuesday estimated that the deficit for the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, would be about $642 billion, or 4 percent of economic output. Just three months ago, it projected that the current-year deficit would be $845 billion, or about 5.3 percent of economic output.

The $203 billion, or 24 percent, reduction to the estimated deficit does not comes from the $85 billion in mandatory cuts known as sequestration, or the package of tax increases that Congress passed this winter to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff. The office had already incorporated those policy changes into its February forecasts.

Rather, it comes mostly from higher-than-expected tax payments from businesses and individuals, as well as an increase in payments to the taxpayers from the bailed-out mortgage financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The Congressional Budget Office said it had bumped up its estimates of current-year tax receipts from individuals by about $69 billion and from corporations by about $40 billion. The office said the factors bolstering tax payments seemed to be “largely temporary,” in part because of higher-income households realizing investment income before tax rates went up in the 2013 calendar year.

It also cut expected spending on Fannie and Freddie by about $95 billion, a reflection of bigger checks that the two companies are cutting to the taxpayers. The mortgage financiers, which have required more than $180 billion in taxpayer financing since the government rescued them in 2008, have returned to profitability in recent quarters on the back of a stronger housing market.

The budget office is now projecting a 10-year cumulative deficit that is $618 billion smaller than it projected a few months ago. The long-term changes are mostly because of smaller projected outlays for the entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, as well as smaller interest payments on the debt.

For instance, in February, the budget office projected that the United States would spend about $8.1 trillion on Medicare and $4.4 trillion on Medicaid over the next 10 fiscal years. It now projects spending of $7.9 trillion on Medicare and $4.3 trillion on Medicaid.

The report again noted that health care cost growth seems to have slowed, leading the budget office to cut its longer-term estimates of health spending by tens of billions of dollars in recent years.

The figures demonstrate just how successful Washington has proved at slashing the deficit through tax increases and spending cuts over the last two years — and how powerful a stronger recovery might be in aiding the federal budget in the long term.

For the first four years of the Obama administration, the deficit totaled more than $1 trillion a year. As of 2009, the budget gap was equivalent to more than 10 percent of economic output. According to the budget office’s new numbers, it will fall to 2 percent — a level that many economists consider sustainable in the long run — in the 2015 fiscal year.

But the office noted that the federal budget gap would probably widen later in the decade, as the country spent more on health care for its aging population as well as more on debt-service payments.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 14, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misspelled the author’s surname. She is Annie Lowrey, not Lowery.

U.S. Cuts Estimate of Sugar Intake of Typical American

It was repeated so often it was accepted as true: the typical American consumed from 95 to 100 pounds of sugar each year. Health experts said that consumption was surely contributing to a nationwide crisis of obesity.

But in a move that has largely gone unnoticed, the Agriculture Department, keeper of the statistics on America’s sweet tooth, has employed new methodology that overnight shaved 20 pounds off its estimate and brought the number down to a precise 76.7 pounds. The move by the department raises questions about the entire notion of per-capita consumption just as the battles over sugar and sweeteners are reaching a peak.

“There’s such an implication of precision and accuracy in that decimal point — boy, we’ve got this nailed now,” said Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “But when you take a good look, it’s built on a foundation of sand.”

Jean C. Buzby, the agricultural economist who headed the department’s team responsible for the data that led to the revision in sugar consumption, agreed that it was far from perfect but said it was better than what was used in the past.

She pointed to the note on each page of the government’s data that labeled them “first estimates” that “are intended to serve as a starting point for additional research and discussion.”

Few people are aware of the change, which quietly occurred two months ago. Dr. Jacobson stumbled across it recently while working on a project on sugar consumption.

He takes issue with the new methodology and contends it could be a setback in the push for healthy eating. Suggestions that sugar consumption is down, or dropping, could take some pressure off companies that make sugary foods, for example.

In e-mails the center obtained through a Freedom of Information request, officials at sugar industry trade groups discussed the benefits of the lower estimate and how they might persuade the U.S.D.A. to make a change that would reduce it even more.

“We perceive it to be in our interest to see as low a per-capita sweetener consumption estimate as possible,” Jack Roney, director of economics and policy analysis at the American Sugar Alliance, wrote in an e-mail on March 30, 2011.

Mr. Roney said in a telephone interview that he was pleased to have “more accurate” information about sugar consumption available. “The extent to which caloric sweeteners are in the public’s eye as a possible source or cause of increasing obesity in this country is huge,” he said. “If folks are assuming there is much greater consumption than there really is, then we are misleading the public unnecessarily.”

Estimating sugar consumption is a tricky proposition, fraught with potential for misjudgments. It is based loosely on an educated guess at how much of various sweetener-laden foods that consumers buy is actually eaten, versus how much is thrown away. “It is difficult to obtain nationally representative estimates of consumer-level food loss,” Dr. Buzby wrote in an e-mail.

There had long been a sense that the estimates the department was using failed to capture all of the loss that was occurring, Dr. Buzby said. Five years ago, just as debate over sugar use was heating up, the U.S.D.A. began an overhaul of what it called “consumer-level food-loss estimates.” It hired RTI International, a nonprofit consulting firm, to help it come up with new loss estimates more firmly anchored in data.

Mary K. Muth, director of food and nutrition policy research at RTI, said she had used data from the Nielsen Company’s Homescan surveys of consumer food purchases and interviews done for the Centers for Disease Control’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to come up with the new loss estimates for sugar and sweeteners.

“It’s an improvement over how it was done before but an incremental one, and surely more work can be done,” Dr. Muth said.

In all, RTI’s revisions called for higher loss estimates for 84 foods and lower losses of 54, while leaving a handful unchanged.

In some cases, the change in loss estimates was drastic. RTI estimated, for example that 69 percent of fresh pumpkins are lost at the consumer level compared with the old estimate of 20 percent. A report on the changes written by Dr. Muth, Dr. Buzby and others concluded more pumpkins were being used for decorations and subsequently discarded.