CBO Projects Obama’s Budget Would Add $9.8 Trillion of Debt

A preliminary analysis of Obama’s most recent proposed budget is in. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the ten-year budget would pin $9.8 trillion of accrued debt onto the country’s already hairy fiscal mess. The year-by-year breakdown in pictures:

Source: Congressional Budget Office, www.cbo.gov


How the CBO describes their methodology:

“Each year CBO estimates the budgetary impact of the proposals in the President’s budget using the same economic assumptions and estimating techniques that the agency uses to produce all of its analyses and cost estimates. Because CBO’s economic forecast and estimating techniques differ from those of the Administration, that “reestimate” of the President’s budget produces estimates of federal revenues, spending, deficits, and debt that differ from those presented in the budget itself.

This report compares CBO’s projections with those of the Administration and with the benchmark figures in CBO’s baseline, which shows the budgetary outlook if current laws and policies remained unchanged. CBO’s use of a consistent methodology for all of these analyses and estimates allows direct comparisons between the Administration’s proposals and other options that are considered by the Congress during the legislative process.”

The most frightening element of this ten-year forecast is that an estimated $5.6 trillion of the debt would be interest expense. (1) Yes, that’s right, interest. This is why rational, reasonable people, as much as they would like everyone to have health insurance (which by the way will never happen, even if government mandated everyone to obtain health insurance), reject the giant spending proposals of this president. Nothing against you, Mr. Obama. The same rational, reasonable people dislike the deficits of Reagan, Bush Sr., and W. just as much. But you’re at the end of a monster accumulation of debt. Stop the major spending plans. Try cost-effective, market-based ways of insuring more people in the health care arena. Put on hold the plans for major corporations to trade carbon indulgences in a “market-based” Cap and Trade system.

As an aside to Cap & Trade, wherever you stand on climate change science, you may be surprised to learn bigger problems exist in the world, if measured by uniform costs and benefits.

The idea that we’re going to continue to increase spending for the next 10 years, only at a slower clip, and make up for it by raising tax revenues is quite a gamble on its own. And that gamble is to get us to this projected fiscal outcome? Yikes.

And I leave you with a road map to reduced deficits laid out by the Obama Administration for the next four years:

Source: CNNMoney.com

Note the roughly $1 trillion increase in tax revenues over the next four years.

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(1) Congressional Budget Office, Preliminary Analysis of the President’s 2011 Budget, retrieved March 5, 2010, http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/112xx/doc11231/index.cfm

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