Obama’s Parting Gift: Trillion-Dollar Deficits As Far As The Eye Can See

Legacy:  Barack Obama came into the White House in 2009 promising a “new era of responsibility.” What he’s left President Trump is a government careening toward fiscal ruin.That’s what the latest report from the Congressional Budget Office shows.

The CBO report looks at what federal spending and revenues will look like over the next decade if the government is left on autopilot. The picture is grim.

Deficits this year are expected to be $559 billion. By 2023, the government will once again be running trillion-dollar annual deficits that will quickly climb in the following years.

Left unchanged, the national debt will worsen by an additional $10 trillion in a decade, equaling almost 90% of the economy.

And that’s despite the fact that, thanks to Obama’s multiple tax increases, revenues are on track to consume more than 18% of the nation’s economy, which is a full percentage point above the average since 1967.

Spending, however, is completely out of control. It’s set to climb from 20.5% of GDP next year to 23.4% by 2027. The post-1967 average was 20%.

ObamaCare subsidies alone will, according to the CBO, climb 22% this year and 20% the next — thanks to the massive increase in premiums. This cost explosion is in addition to the vast increase in Medicaid spending ObamaCare already generated. And it’s all on top of fast-growing Social Security and Medicare, both of which are rapidly headed toward insolvency.

Perhaps the biggest driver of future deficits, however, is the incredibly sluggish economy the CBO expects current economic policies to produce.

The CBO expects real GDP growth of 2.3% this year, followed by a long-term average of a paltry 1.9%.  To call this dismal is an understatement, but it pretty much mirrors what’s been happening over the past seven years…(read more)

Source: IBD

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