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?Bending The Curve? Or Breaking The Bank?

Regarding President Obama?s upcoming budget, Politico reports today:

Obama?s aides now talk about ?bending the curve? ? that is, changing the rate of increase of the deficit ? rather than balancing the budget. The plan released this week will ?seek to restore the nation to a sustainable fiscal trajectory over of [sic] five-to-ten year window,? Orszag said.

Obama?s pledge is to reduce the budget by 2013 to a mere $533 billion, a figure that previously would have been thought of as staggering.

When the costs of interest payments on the borrowing necessary for the Obama ?stimulus? and housing bailout (but not for the as yet unannounced additional bank bailout, auto bailout, universal health care, etc.) are added in, the total by 2013 is expected to be somewhere well in excess of three trillion dollars. ($3.27 trillion for the ?stimulus? alone.)

I?m neither an economist nor a mathematician (or, for that matter, even an arithmetician), but it seems to me this means that if Obama?s ?stimulus? etc. had totaled ?only,? say, one or two trillion then, with his own budget proposals and projections, we?d have a surplus in 2013 of between $500 billion and a trillion and a half.

Obama is nice and appealing all that, but he?s certainly beginning to look like a pretty expensive luxury item that we can?t afford.

Full post as published by Discriminations on February 22, 2009 (boomark / email).