Don’t Be Hatin’ on Obama’s Budget Until You’re Hatin’ on How Bad It’s Really Gonna Be February 14, 2012
Posted by geoff in News.trackback
There’s a lot of flak over the President’s budget, which appears to be based on the philosophy that cutting government spending will hurt the economy, while increasing taxes on the wealthy and business owners won’t. But I’m going to leave that to others to hash out, at least for the moment. No, what I’d like to say is:The budget situation is likely to be worse than projected.Yep, if you look at the Obama administration’s projections in every budget they’ve made (the budgets for FY2010 – FY2013), you’ll find that the budget for a given year keeps going up we get closer to that year. For instance:
In the figure, the x-axis is the budget that made the prediction, while the bars represent the year the prediction was made for. As you can see, the FY2010 budget predicted that slightly over 22% of GDP would be spent in FY2012. A year later that projection was increased to over 23%. In last year’s budget (FY2012), it was over 23.5%, and this year they’re telling us it’ll be over 24%.
With the exception of the projections provided in the FY2011 budget, the projections for the years of FY2013 (red bars) and FY2014 (green bars) follow the same trend, rising as the year approaches. Based on this, it’s very likely that the actual budget for FY2013 will be in the 23.5-24% range, and that FY2014 will be well over 23%.
So don’t just sit there despairing over Obama’s budget! Sit there despairing over his budget and the likelihood that it’s far too optimistic!
Was this post incomprehensible? It’s trying to say that when Obama’s team made their budget prediction for FY12 three years ago, it was unrealistically low. The prediction went up two years ago, again one year ago, and this year it’s even higher.
So when you look at their projections into future years, you can be reasonably sure that if Obama is at the helm, we’ll be spending quite a bit more than he’s telling us.
We thought you were making a joke.
I can see how my renowned sense of humor might lead you that misapprehension.
One minor point…there haven’t BEEN any budgets since His Wholly Reluctance God/King SCOAMF took office.
So, it’s really waaaay better.