President Obama’s 2013 budget would more than double the federal deficit over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported Friday.
"In all, between 2013 and 2022, deficits would total $6.4 trillion (or 3.2 percent of total GDP projected for that period), $3.5 trillion more than the cumulative deficit in CBO's baseline," the nonpartisan office wrote in its analysis of the president’s budget.
Under the CBO baseline, which assumes that current spending and tax policy would remain unchanged, the deficit would increase by $2.9 trillion over the same period.
In the next year alone, the president’s budget would increase the deficit by $365 billion, CBO projected.
The CBO projects that under the president’s budget, federal debt held by the public would rise by $8.7 trillion over the next decade, totaling $18.8 trillion (76 percent of GDP) by 2023. Under the current-law baseline, public debt would increase more slowly, to $15.1 billion by the end of the decade.
The findings cast considerable doubt on President Obama’s own claims about his budget.
When he unveiled his budget in February, Obama said it was a fiscally responsible document that, if enacted, would significantly reduce the federal deficit.
"Part of our job is to bring down our deficit," Obama said. "And if Congress adopts this budget, then along with the cuts that we’ve already made, we’ll be able to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion by the year 2022—$4 trillion."
He was off by $7.5 trillion.