National debt to be higher than White House forecast, CBO says
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 6, 2010
President Obama's proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday. Proposed tax cuts for the middle class account for nearly a third of that shortfall.
The 10-year outlook released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is somewhat gloomier than White House projections, which found that Obama's budget request would produce deficits that would add about $8.5 trillion to the national debt by 2020.
The CBO and the White House are in relative agreement about the short-term budget picture, with both predicting a deficit of about $1.5 trillion this year -- a post-World War II record at 10.3 percent of the overall economy -- and $1.3 trillion in 2011. But the CBO is considerably less optimistic about future years, predicting that deficits would never fall below 4 percent of the economy under Obama's policies and would begin to grow rapidly after 2015. continue
