CBO Estimate: Obama Deficits To Be 20% Higher Than Expected

Again, Team "O" is either stupid or dishonest or both.

POLITICO reports:

With new estimates due Friday from the Congressional Budget Office, the White House is being warned to expect a grim set of deficit projections, adding well over $1 trillion on top of the red ink already conceded in President Barack Obama’s 10-year spending plan.

Refusing to be swayed by the numbers, top aides to the president met Wednesday evening in the Capitol with House Democratic allies on moving the plan ahead, including an effort to use expedited budget procedures to advance Obama’s healthcare initiative past Senate filibuster threats.

But New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, warned that the growing debt burden reflected in CBO figures is too big to be easily dismissed.

“The CBO re-score is going to be an eye-opening event for a lot of people who want to finesse this,” Gregg told POLITICO. “You cannot finesse the coming fiscal calamity we are facing, the size of the debt in the out years and the size of the deficit in the out years.” Gregg refused to discuss any of the CBO estimates.

But behind the scenes, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) has begun to aggressively raise warnings with the administration and his colleagues about the data.

CBO said Wednesday that it has yet to complete its formal scoring of the Obama budget. But some data, including a revised economic baseline, have been provided to Congress, and Conrad appears to be using these numbers to map out where he believes the figures will end up.

In 2014, at which point the White House projects a deficit of $570 billion, it’s now expected that CBO will show a number in excess of $700 billion. Five years later, in 2019, Obama’s budget concedes that the deficit will have widened to $712 billion; Democrats expect CBO to put the number over $1 trillion.

The cumulative impact could be substantial. The White House has already conceded that the Obama budget will produce deficits of about $6.9 trillion over 10 years. If the CBO projections were to add in the range of $1.5 trillion more, as some Democrats expect, that would be more than a 20 percent increase and would surely affect debate in Congress.