$9 Trillion Was Optimistic...The Real Number Is More Like $14 Trillion

This is shockingly ridiculous:

Actual Deficit? Nine Trillion? Nope. Try $14.4 Trillion.

Over ten years. Hey, that's just 1.44 trillion per year. Practically chump change.

Just so you know, the CBO's baseline projections are based -- due to the law and rules of how they do these things -- only on actual law. So, for example, the CBO does not factor the costs of partially extending the expiring Bush tax cuts -- at least to the poor and middle class, as Obama has promised -- into its figures. Nor Congress passing a one- or two- year duration adjustment to the tax code to keep the Alternate Minimum Tax from hitting millions of middle-class taxpayers, which they do every time it comes up.

Such things make the CBO's projections implausible. To make more plausible projections, you have to take into account not just the law as it is but the law as it almost certainly will be.

With today’s release of new budget projections from the Obama administration showing deficits totaling more than $9 trillion over the next 10 years, The Concord Coalition said that cost control must be the primary focus of health care reform and called for a bipartisan deficit reduction plan. Furthermore, the administration’s numbers are optimistic when compared to what would occur if we simply extended current policy. The Concord Coalition Plausible Baseline, created using the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) updated projections, shows that current policy would lead to $14.4 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years.

“You would have to be in a coma for these numbers not to be an effective wake-up call. The most disturbing thing is not the astronomical deficit this year or next, but the unacceptably high deficits that persist after the economy has presumably recovered in 2011 and beyond. It’s time to come out of the partisan trenches and begin work on real solutions. Clearly, we have a serious structural problem that requires legislative action,” said Concord Coalition Executive Director Robert L. Bixby.

So, here's the situation: the current estimate of the $9 trillion deficit is based on everything staying exactly as it is right now. In reality, spending will go up (hey, it's government, it always goes up), taxes will increase, and policies will change. When you take into account estimates of these other things, the deficit almost doubles again! And this is before Obamacare, cap-and-tax, and all the other spending binges Obama still wants to go on.

This is literal economic suicide.

If we do not stop Barack Obama and the Democrats from their unchecked spending binges, America is finished. Period.

There's my two cents.