« Obama fails to stand up for American interests in Honduras | Is Obama losing his political magic? »
June 29, 2009
Gloomy CBO report on deficit highlights where Obama has brought us
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has some depressing projections regarding Obamadebt.
In fact, the report "The Long Term Budget Outlook" makes me want to grab a Xanax and go back to sleep this morning.
It's that bad (PDF required):
Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path-meaning that federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run. Although great uncertainty surrounds longterm fiscal projections, rising costs for health care and the aging of the U.S. population will cause federal spending to increase rapidly under any plausible scenario for current law. Unless revenues increase just as rapidly, the rise in spending will produce growing budget deficits and accumulating debt. Keeping deficits and debt from reaching levels that would cause substantial harm to the economy would require increasing revenues significantly as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), decreasing projected spending sharply, or some combination of the two.
For decades, spending on the federal government's major health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, has been growing faster than the economy (as has health care spending in the private sector). The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that if current laws do not change, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid combined will grow from roughly 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent by 2035 (what this report describes as the intermediate term) and to more than 17 percent by 2080 (what this report considers to be the long term). That projection means that in 2080, without changes in policy, the federal government would be spending almost as much, as a share of the economy, on just its two major health care programs as it has spent on all of its programs and services in recent years.
It is hard reading this study and not come away with a sense of foreboding about the future. The growth of government under both Democrats and Republicans over the last 30 years has our financial chickens finally coming home to roost. This is a Washington problem made many times worse by the fantastically accelerated debt accumulation initiated by the liberals in Congress and President Obama. The only thing that appears to have changed is the timeline for disaster; Obama and his crew have sped up the day of reckoning.
Read the whole report. Some of it is very technical but I'm sure you'' be able to capture the gist of what the CBO is saying; we are on a path to fiscal destruction and it appears that the only way out is massive tax increases and massive spending cuts.
FOLLOW US ON
Recent Articles
- Greenland: How Trump Can Deal with the Raging Danes to America's Advantage
- Greenland at the Crossroads: Why U.S. Leadership is Crucial
- How the Death Penalty Should Work
- Mr. Schumer — You Make No Sense!
- The Price of Reciprocity: Why President Trump’s Tariffs Make Strategic Sense
- The Least Dangerous Branch No More
- Is Bipartisan Nationalism Possible?
- Sitting Down for the 'College Talk'
- Trump’s Tariffs Will Not Cause Inflation
- The Republican Off-Cycle Election Challenge
Blog Posts
- Smart nations lining up for tariff deals with President Trump -- and you can just tell which ones they are
- What a month of April 1968
- Florida’s opportunity to defang the property tax monster
- Iran: Israel and the USA have the same objective
- Fighting for babies while black
- America is raising feral children
- Unmanifest Destiny: Is America heading for the ash heap of history?
- A look at the vigilance we need for a safe society
- Mexico supports a terror state
- The making of an anarchist
- Tariffs: Trump, Nancy, and the chatbots (mostly) agree
- Tariffs force the world to bargain
- Washington Post falls for terrorist propaganda...again
- A simple question on trade
- Brace for more astroturf as pre-planned protests ‘spring to life’ this weekend