Trillion-dollar deficits over next decade

WASHINGTON — President Obama's plans to cut middle-class taxes, overhaul health care and expand access to college would require massive borrowing over the next decade, leaving the nation mired far deeper in debt than the administration previously estimated, congressional budget analysts said Friday.

In the first independent analysis of Obama's budget proposal, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded Obama's policies, if implemented, would cause government spending to swell far above historic levels even after costly programs to ease the recession and stabilize the nation's financial system have ended.

Tax collections, meanwhile, would lag well behind spending, producing huge annual budget deficits that would force the nation to borrow nearly $9.3 trillion over the next decade, $2.3 trillion more than the president predicted when he unveiled his budget request one month ago.

Although Obama would come close to meeting his goal of cutting in half the deficit he inherited by the end of his first term, the CBO predicts that deficits under his policies would exceed 4 percent of the overall economy over the next 10 years, a level that White House Budget Director Peter Orszag acknowledged Friday would "not be sustainable."

The result, according to the CBO, would be an ever-expanding national debt that would exceed 82 percent of the overall economy by 2019 — double last year's level — and threaten the nation's financial stability. "This clearly creates a scenario where the country's going to go bankrupt. It's almost that simple," said Sen. Judd Gregg, N.H., the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. "One would hope these numbers would wake somebody up."

Orszag defended the president's agenda in a conference call, noting that the forecast of bigger deficits and mounting debt is largely due to the CBO's view that the recession will be more severe and the recovery more tepid than the Obama administration expects.

The administration's economic assumptions have come under fire for being too optimistic: In the next decade, the administration projects that the economy will grow at an average annual rate of 2.8 percent, much rosier than forecasts by the CBO (2.5 percent) and the Blue Chip consensus (2.3 percent).

Orszag, who served as CBO director before joining the Obama administration, also argued that long-term budget estimates are notoriously uncertain.

In a speech Friday to state legislators at the White House, Obama said his budget "makes hard choices about where to save and where to spend."

But he added: "What we will not cut are investments that will lead to real growth and prosperity over the long term."

The CBO is the official scorekeeper for budgeting on Capitol Hill, and the new report could complicate efforts to win congressional approval for Obama's $3.6 trillion request for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

While Obama had predicted a deficit of nearly $1.2 trillion for 2010, CBO puts next year's budget gap at nearly $1.4 trillion. And this year's deficit is now projected to soar past $1.8 trillion, or 13 percent of the economy.