April 27, 2010
The Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street) told readers that: “Official forecasts suggest that without sharp changes in federal spending or tax collections, the United States could enter into a downward spiral of indebtedness that by the end of this decade would erode the country’s ability to educate its children, care for the elderly or mount a robust national defense.”
Wow, that sounds really dire. It would have been great if they gave a source for this one because that is not what the standard sources say. For example, if we go to our most recent Budget and Economic Outlook from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), we find the economy growing at an average annual rate of 2.4 percent over the years 2015-2020. CBO also projects average productivity growth for this period at 1.8 percent a year, meaning in principle that living standards can rise at roughly that rate. It also projects an average interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds of 5.5 percent, this is only slightly higher than the low-point of the budget surplus years at the end of the Clinton administration.
In short, there is no evidence in these projections of the sort of crisis described in the Post article. It would be interesting to see the document(s) that provide the basis for the Post’s assertion.
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