The White House has delivered its 10-year budget forecast to Congress, and it predicts a trillion-dollar deficit for fiscal year 2012.
The project, titled the Mid-Session Review, projects $42.6 trillion in spending, and will balloon the federal government’s accumulated debt to $25.4 trillion by 2022, according to an analysis from the office of Sen. Jeff Sessions, the GOP’s budget chief in the Senate. The review was released Friday, reducing the chance it will get much coverage in the media.
Last year, the national debt grew to $14.8 trillion, an increase of $5 trillion from 2008.
The river of red ink shows that President Barack Obama’s campaign-trail ads are “dramatically false,” said a statement from Sessions.
Those new ads promise to pay down the accumulated deficits in a “balanced way.”
In the July 23 campaign ad, dubbed “The Choice,” Obama says to the camera that a tax increase is “asking the wealthy to pay a little more so we can pay down the debt in a balanced way, so that we can afford to invest in education, manufacturing and home-grown American energy.”
But Obama’s new budget plan predicts spending of $46.2 trillion, which is $1.5 trillion above the so-called “baseline” and 57 percent higher than the 2012’s spending rate.
The baseline was agreed by White House and Hill negotiators in 2011, although many experts and advocates say it likely will be abandoned next year, even if Obama is reelected.
Sessions’ statement said that the spending plan shows the president has no intention of using tax increases to cut the accumulated deficit, and would use them instead to fund the $42.6 trillion spending plan.
The budget projection show that Obama’s misleading ads “ought to be pulled down,” said Sessions’ statement.
The administration’s Mid-Session Review predicts accumulated deficits of $8.3 trillion between 2013 and 2022.
But Session’s analysis adds the current 2012 deficit of $1.2 trillion, plus $1.1 trillion in little-recognized borrowing from government trust-funds, to argue that the administration is actually on a path to increase the cumulative deficit by $10.5 trillion by 2022.
The predicted $25 trillion debt is only part of the federal government’s debts, as it has also made numerous long-term promises — via such programs as Social Security, Medicare and federal pensions — that will cost roughly $90 trillion over the next several decades.
By law, the Mid-Session Review was scheduled for delivery to Congress mid-month.
