James Antle of the Daily Caller probes the latest projections for the federal budget deficit.
Barack Obama is ready to turn the page on the $1 trillion deficits that once defined his presidency. That’s easy for him to say — he’ll no longer be in office when everything blows up.
Yes, Monday’s Congressional Budget Office report is consistent with his State of the Union assurances of “a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry and booming energy production.” Especially shrinking deficits: the annual discrepancy between federal spending and revenues is projected to drop to $468 billion.
While that’s still a big number, it’s the lowest of the Obama administration and amounts to only about 2 percent of the economy. Deficits peaked at $1.4 trillion.
That’s the good news. The bad news is the deficit begins spiking again in 2017, the year Obama’s successor will be sworn into office, before returning to $1 trillion a year in 2025.
All that red ink comes without another Great Recession, with the country’s biggest wars supposedly ending, without any new big-ticket spending items.
Medicaid spending will be double what it was when Obama took office, thanks in part to Obamacare. Spending on the health care exchanges, a mere $15 billion in 2014, will be just under $100 billion annually in only two years.
Between 2016 and 2025, the Obamacare Medicaid expansion will cost $920 billion and $1.1 trillion on health insurance subsidies. That’s a rounding error away from $2 trillion.
Think about that the next time you read a White House statement about “deficit-reducing health care reform.” Obama has been pretending you can be Calvin Coolidge and Lyndon Johnson simultaneously for quite some time.
