Obama lately has acted as though most of the work has already been done to get the debt problem under control. At a recent press conference, he claimed that he’s already cut long-term deficits by $2.5 trillion and that “closing some additional loopholes (and) doing some additional cuts” are all that’s needed to cross the finish line.
But the latest CBO report shows that the country is far from out of the woods. In fact, despite the supposed budget cuts and the $620 billion in tax hikes Obama brags about, deficits start climbing every year after 2015, reaching back up to $978 billion by 2023.
Debt, too, starts expanding again as a share of GDP, climbing to 77% by 2023, with no end in sight.
Even that grim outlook is unrealistic. The CBO’s forecast assumes, for example, that Congress will let scheduled huge cuts in Medicare payments to doctors go through, even though they haven’t done so for years.
It assumes ObamaCare’s costs don’t explode, despite increasing evidence to the contrary. And it assumes there’s no recession anytime in the next decade and that interest rates remain reasonably low.
The CBO also makes it abundantly clear that the cause of this crisis is out-of-control spending, not insufficient tax revenues.