The Federal Budget- A Lot of Zeros

The first news story I read today was a piece on Senator Judd Gregg criticizing Obama's budget. If the senator's name sounds familiar it is because he is the same man that Obama picked to head the Commerce Department. He is also the same man who turned down Obama's appointment because he thought Obama's views were too radical. (Surprise)

In the news piece I read this morning Gregg had this to say, “Today’s analysis of the President’s FY 2010 budget by the Congressional Budget Office confirms that under the President’s plan, our debt will increase to shocking levels that are simply unsustainable and will devastate future economic opportunities for our children and grandchildren"

After reading Gregg's statement, I had to see this budget for myself.

Here is the Whitehouse.gov copy of the budget.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/
& Here is the Congressional Budget Office's review of the budget:
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/100xx/doc10014/03-20-PresidentBudget.pdf

...If you decide to take a look at the budget it may give you a headache if you aren't familiar government accounting practices. As a matter of fact, it gave me a headache and I have an accounting background. Never the less they are worth looking over.

There are some major discrepancies in these two reports.
The primary discrepancy in the two reports is the budget deficit calculation. The White House is predicting much lower deficits than Congress. How much lower you ask......oh by about 2.3 trillion lower. In other words, the Big O and the Democratically Controlled Congress are not even close in their forecasts. Is the Big O a little too optimistic??

If you read through the Congressional budget review, which I highly recommend, there sections that are extremely alarming. Here are a few of the things that troubled me:

"Debt held by the public would rise, from 41 percent of GDP in 2008 to 57 percent in 2009 and to 82 percent of GDP by 2019." (FYI the Chinese= "the public")

"Spending for mandatory programs would fall in 2010 and 2011...and then rise by an average of 4.7 percent annually (about three-fourths of a percentage point above the growth rate of nominal GDP) through 2019."

"CBO’s estimate of the deficits under the President’s budget are higher each year than those estimated by the Administration—by $93 billion for 2009 and by about $2.3 trillion for the 2010–2019 period"

"The President’s budget proposal would establish a fund to finance some of the costs of health care reform, although the document does not specify the policies that would constitute such reform"

...and there's more. Check it out for yourself.