The American Spectator

The Spectacle Blog

The Congressional Budget Office has released its assessment of President Obama's budget, and the results aren't pretty. According the analysis, deficits in the next decade will be worse than what the White House has projected, much higher than they would be if we were to follow current law, and even higher than what CBO had forecast last year.

Between 2011 and 2020, the nation will accumulate $9.8 trillion in deficits as a under the Obama budget, according to the CBO, ending the decade with $20.3 trillion in public debt, which translates into a staggering 90 percent of gross domestic product (compared with the 53 percent Obama "inherited" in 2009). By contrast, in its own budget release, the White House Office of Management and Budget had projected debt at 18.6 trillion in 2020 (or about $1.7 trillion less than the CBO).

Obama's budget would also add more to the debt when it is viewed relative to the CBO baseline scenario that assumes current law is followed, as demonstrated by the area chart below. The blue area represents the additional debt created by Obama's budget -- while it may not look huge, the difference reaches about $5 trillion relative to the CBO baseline scenario (or added debt of 23 percent of GDP) by 2020.

These projections have gotten worse in the past year. For instance, when it assessed Obama's budget last March, the CBO projected debt of $17.3 trillion in 2019 -- it now sees debt reaching $18.9 trillion that same year.