February 06, 2013
Okay all of you liberals who thought that the deficits were due to too little tax revenue and all you economists who pointed out that the large deficits were due to a collapsed economy, you’re wrong. The United States has a spending problem the NYT said so.
A NYT article on President Obama’s speech on the budget told readers:
“New deficit projections will define the scope of the nation’s spending problem.”
See, it’s a spending problem!
Addendum:
I see from readers’ comments that the NYT has apparently fixed the spending problem in subsequent edits. It still tells readers:
“the budget office once again emphasized that the deficit will rise later in the decade, beginning in 2016, and continue do to so as the population ages and health care prices rise.”
While Social Security is projected to rise modestly as a share of GDP and health care costs a bit more so, the largest reason for the projected rise in deficits from 2013 to 2023 is higher interest payments from the government. Net interest is projected to rise from 1.4 percent of GDP this year to 3.3 percent of GDP in 2023. This projected 1.9 percentage point increase in interest payments is by far the largest component driving the projected increase in the deficit over the decade.
In fact, the actual increase is somewhat larger since the amount of money that the Federal Reserve Board refunds from its holdings of government bonds is projected to drop from 0.5 percent of GDP at present to 0.2 percent of GDP in 2023. This drop of 0.3 percentage points of GDP, added to the 1.9 percentage point rise in net interest implies that higher interest costs will add 2.2 percentage points to the deficit in 2023.
This would have been worth mentioning both because it tells readers why deficits are rising and also because the rise in interest rates is a matter of policy. The CBO projections assume that the Fed will decide to raise interest rates. It is not something that just happens by itself.
(Morning Edition committed the same sin.)
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