Don’t panic, but Ambinder’s right
February 26th, 2009Today, Marc Ambinder noted that even though Obama’s projected budget halves the deficit by 2013, it starts to rise again through 2019:
As Obama noted two nights ago, he intends to cut the federal budget deficit from $1.75 trillion in 2009 to $533 billion by the end of his first term.
But what’s projected for 2014? A slightly higher deficit — $570b. For 2015? $583b. By 2016, the deficit exceeds $636b again; by 2019, it’s up to about $712b.
The budget projects that the national debt will increase nearly two-fold over 10 years, from $8.3 trillion in 2009 to $15.3 trillion in 2019.
However, if you add the (not particularly troubling and very well predicted) fall in the Social Security surplus into the equation, you see that in dollars, Obama’s projected deficit is essentially flat from 2014-2019:
Further, if you plot the deficit as a percentage of GDP, a more appropriate measure of the severity of a deficit, it holds steady when you include Social Security outlays and revenue and even decreases if you look at the budget independent of Social Security:
Ambinder noted this in his post and was then castigated by Greg Anrig at TPM for laying the blame at the feet of Social Security:
Marc Ambinder just wrote a short post raising alarms about how Social Security is going to cause the national debt to explode over 10 years, even though the numbers he’s looking at show no such thing.
Well, the numbers do show exactly that, and nothing about his post is particularly hysterical although I suppose people inclined to think Social Security’s bankrupt might look at it that way. Pointing out that the Social Security surplus is declining quickly (the yearly surplus, not the amount accrued over time) and will soon turn into a deficit isn’t alarmism. If he also warned folks that their checks would never come, that would be undue alarmism.
What I’d really be interested in seeing OMB whip up is a projected deficit vs. current law deficit projection through, say, 2050 that takes health expenditures into account. Also, a projection through 2019 that includes an extension of the 2001 tax cuts for the top 2 brackets would be a good number to have on hand once folks started complaining about it.
