Saturday, March 19, 2011

CBO: Obama understates deficits by $2.3 trillion

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A new assessment of President Barack Obama's budget released Friday says the White House underestimates future budget deficits by more than $2 trillion over the upcoming decade.

The estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says that if Obama's February budget submission is enacted into law it would produce deficits totaling $9.5 trillion over 10 years -- an average of almost $1 trillion a year.

Obama's budget saw deficits totaling $7.2 trillion over the same period.

The difference is chiefly because CBO has a less optimistic estimate of how much the government will collect in tax revenues, partly because the administration has rosier economic projections.

But the agency also rejects the administration's claims of more than $300 billion of that savings -- to pay for preventing a cut in Medicare payments to doctors -- because it doesn't specify where it would come from. Likewise, CBO fails to credit the White House with an additional $328 billion that would come from unspecified "bipartisan financing" to pay for transportation infrastructure projects such as high speed rail lines and road and bridge construction.
Read the rest here.
HT: T-19

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder if many persons have realized how TRILLIONS have become part of our daily usage. This is of enormous benefit to President Obama. A TWO trillion dollar added deficit just does NOT sound as bad as TWO THOUSAND billion. So when the Democrats in the Senate can (only) find SIS billion to cut and the dedicit is ONE trillion, it sounds like they really tried their best. And the band played on. Statmann

Anonymous said...

Oops. That should read SIX and not SIS. Statmann