Obama's Deficits: Not His Fault?

Excerpt from Robert Robb's Feb 3, 2010 article Obama's Deficits: Not His Fault? on RealClearPolitics:

The Bush tax cuts expire this year. Except for the legacy costs of the Iraq war, Obama is free to recommend changing anything Bush did. The deficits he recommends from 2011 on are purely his own.

And they are massive, and driven by spending.

Obama proposes that the federal government spend over 25 percent of GDP in 2011, compared to a historical average of around 20.5 percent. He justifies this as necessary to continue to fight the recession.

Obama, however, projects that the recession will be fully over in 2011 and robust growth under way. Yet he proposes that federal spending continue to be nearly 24 percent of GDP through 2020.

In other words, rather than wind down the additional recession spending after recovery, Obama is proposing that it simply become a new, higher base.

After the World War II debt was reduced, accumulated federal debt never exceeded 50 percent of GDP until 2009, when it reached 53 percent. Under Obama's recommendations it would grow to 77 percent by 2020.

If Obama were to recommend a path to return spending to its historical share of economic output, in 2020 the deficit would be just $255 billion, about what the federal government spends each year on large capital projects, and just 1 percent of GDP. In other words, not a problem. And federal spending would have still increased by more than 4 percent a year since 2008.

Instead, Obama recommends a 2020 deficit of over $1 trillion and a troubling 4.2 percent of GDP.