In the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of the budget over the next decade, revenues will be about $2 trillion less than the administration projects, while spending will be lower by about $600 billion. This is due to different economic estimates.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-06/obama-spending-plan-underestimates-deficits-budget-office-says.htmlPresident 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 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.
Deficits of that magnitude would force the Treasury to continue borrowing at prodigious rates, sending the national debt soaring to 90 percent of the economy by 2020, the CBO said. Interest payments on the debt would also skyrocket by $800 billion over the same period.
Obama's tax-cutting agenda is by far the biggest contributor to those budget gaps, the CBO said. As part of his campaign pledge to protect families making less than $250,000 a year from new taxes, the president is proposing to prevent the alternative minimum tax from expanding to ensnare millions of additional taxpayers. He also wants to make permanent a series of tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration, which are scheduled to expire at the end of this year.
National debt to be higher than White House forecast, CBO says
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