In last week’s SOTU speech, Barack Obama suggested a 3-year non-defense/TARP/bailout discretionary spending “freeze”. Today, he unleashed a budget that, put together with his FY2009 and FY2010 budgets, will result in, by his administration’s own admission, another deficit of over $1 trillion ($1.27 trillion to be exact) in FY2011, a historic first-term (FY2009-FY2012) $5.07 trillion deficit (with a projected 4-year “low” of $0.83 trillion in FY2012), a “minimum” deficit of $0.71 trillion (in 2014), and a ten-year projected $8.53 trillion deficit between FY2011 and FY2020. Oh yeah; this year’s budget, at a projected deficit of $1.56 trillion, will top last year’s record $1.43 trillion deficit.
Those numbers are significantly worse than the “baseline” estimates released by the Congressional Budget Office just last week. The comparable numbers from the CBO estimates are a $1.44 trillion deficit this year, a $0.980 trillion deficit in FY2011, a $0.65 trillion deficit in FY2012, a “first-term” deficit of $4.48 trillion, a ten-year $6.05 trillion deficit between FY2011 and FY2020, and a “minimum” deficit of $0.48 trillion (also in FY2014).
A couple of side notes before I continue. First, while I could have used billions for the numbers under $1 trillion, I decided to keep the numbers in the same “base”. In the chart below, since the Washington Post used billions in their original, I decided to do so in my remake as well.
Second, a word of note about the CBO “baseline” – it assumes that the only changes to current tax law are those already part of law (e.g. the Bush tax cuts expire in their entirety, and the Alternate Minimum Tax doesn’t get its annual “fix), and that spending on discretionary spending increases at “only” the rate of inflation.
I’m sure you remember the chart from the Washington Post produced near the end of March comparing the OMB estimate of deficits in Obama’s FY2010 to the CBO estimate. Since Kevin Binversie appears to be looking for an update, I’ll provide one.
Click for the full-sized chart
Revisions/extensions (6:55 pm 2/1/2010) – In one of my previous drafts, I had the 10-year minimum deficit as projected by OMB today. Somehow, I had lost it in the published version. I have put it back in.
