Fausta's Blog

Obama Raises ’10 Deficit Outlook 19% to $1.5 Trillion

U.S. unemployment will surge to 10 percent this year and the budget deficit will be $1.5 trillion next year, both higher than previous Obama administration forecasts because of a recession that was deeper and longer than expected, White House budget chief Peter Orszag said.

The Office of Management and Budget forecasts that the U.S. economy will shrink 2.8 percent this year, worse than the 1.2 percent contraction the OMB projected in May. For next year, the budget office said the gross domestic product will grow 2.0 percent, less than the 3.2 percent expected in May. By 2011, the economy would be well on its way to recovery, growing at a 3.8 percent annual rate, according to the administration’s mid-year economic review, released this morning.

The CBO is as pessimistic,

Separately, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office today predicted that the jobless rate would average 10.2 percent next year, gloomier than the White House projection

In plain words, the GDP decline is twice as bad as Obama WH predicted.

Oh yes, America’s fiscal situation is a dreadful mess. Take a look:

As a percentage of the total economy, the United States looks to have an astounding debt-to-GDP ratio of 11 percent this year, with that number declining to around 4 percent from 2015 though 2019. And total debt held by the public will rise to 68 percent of GDP by that year versus 33 percent in 2001.

Those numbers, however, are actually a bit on the rosy side. In his blog, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, notes that the forecasts presume no change in current tax laws, such as the continued existence of the Bush tax cuts and the alternative minimum tax (AMT), which grabs more and more taxpayers ever year at a lower and lower income level.

Such forecasts also assume annual spending increases grow at the rate of inflation. But tomorrow is rarely the same as today in Washington. A more realistic scenario — if the AMT were indexed for inflation, most of the Bush tax cuts continued and spending rose as it has in the past — would see the deficit at 8.5 percent of GDP in 2019. That is a level, before the current crisis, not seen since World War Two.

These are third-world economy numbers. Towering inferno numbers.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, economics, economy, WhiteHouse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.