You might easily have missed a little news story the other day about the deficits our nation can expect if President Barack Obama’s proposed budget is adopted by Congress.
The Congressional Budget Office and the president have rather different ideas on the size of those deficits. The president says his budget plan would produce “only” $7.2 trillion in deficits over 10 years – on top of the existing $14 trillion national debt. But the CBO says his estimate is $2.3 trillion short. It says the added deficits would really total $9.5 trillion over a decade under the Obama plan.
The CBO simply does not accept the president’s rosy assumptions about how much tax revenue the federal government can realistically collect in coming years, nor his extremely optimistic projections of economic growth. The CBO also doubts the big-spending administration’s claims of ill-defined “savings.”
Congress should start being serious about getting federal finances in order, since the president isn’t.