August 27, 2014
The headline of the Washington Post piece on the new budget projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) told readers, “CBO: Deficit falls to $506 billion in 2014, but debt continues to rise.”
Both parts of this are wrong if the comparison is the most recent prior set of projections. The deficit projected for 2014 is actually somewhat higher in the most recent projections, $506 billion compared to $492 billion in the projections made in April. Both figures are below last year’s deficit of $680 billion. Measured as a share of GDP the deficit fell from 4.1 percent in 2013 to 2.9 percent in the most recent projections for 2014.
However the debt numbers in the new projections are lower than the debt numbers in the prior set. CBO now projects that the debt will be 77.2 percent of GDP at the end of the projection period in 2024. It previous had projected a debt to GDP ratio of 78.1 percent.
The article got both of these points right.
Comments