CBO Outlook: Grim for Long-Term Budget Projections

No one should be shocked at the release of this information by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) this morning.  The problem is that the Obama Administration is doing nothing to fix the problems but adding to them.  Every time we turn around we are learning that Obamacare is going to be costing $450 billion more over the next 10 years and giving retirees earning $60,000 a year free health care:

Wow. Philip Klein points us to this AP story, in which Richard Foster, Chief Actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, says that, due to a glitch in Obamacare, married couples of early retirees making around $64,000 a year will become eligible for Medicaid. According to Foster, as many as 3 million Americans will qualify for the benefit. It’s “a twist government number crunchers say they discovered only after the complex bill was signed.” 

If we do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, in which the average annual Medicaid expenditure per early retiree is $15,000 per year, the ten-year cost of this glitch could be as high as $450 billion. “It’s almost like allowing middle-class people to qualify for food stamps, [Foster] suggested”

That is bizarre that you could be earning $60,000 in retirement and qualify for Medicaid.  This is what happens when a group of people write a bill, put it all together, don't read it, and it is passed into law by one Party -- Democrats before the new Congress could take office.  Just one more item in a long list to use to send Obama packing in January 2013.  This Country cannot afford four more years of the community organizer as President.

BTW, this site will not be following Huntsman's lead for a kinder and gentler political campaign for President.  We will give you the hard hitting facts about Obama and the Democrats to make up your own mind.  President Reagan never kept the gloves on against Jimmy Carter so why should our nominee do that against Obama who is a lot meaner than Carter ever thought of being?

Outlook: Grim 

June 22, 2011 11:13 A.M. 

By Yuval Levin  

This morning, the Congressional Budget Office released its updated long-term budget projections. Needless to say, the picture is very unpleasant. 

The basics haven’t changed all that much from last year’s extremely grim projections, but our troubles are coming at us faster. The debt projections in the document are the easiest way to see that. In last year’s Outlook document, CBO projected that our national debt would be 91% of GDP in 2021; they now say it will be 101% of GDP in 2021—that is, a decade from now our debt will be larger than our economy, and of course still growing quickly. By 2030, they project it will top 150% of GDP, and by 2037 it will be 200% of GDP. They assume it will continue to grow swiftly after that, but (although they extend long-range projections for spending and revenues all the way to 2085) their specific numerical projections for debt stop after 2037, when we cross 200% of GDP. We should probably be grateful for that, as the figures beyond that would only depress us all the more. 

Of course, this is only what will happen if we fail to change course—if we do not reform our entitlements, replace Obamacare with a reform that will meaningfully curtail the growth of health-care costs, and reduce our discretionary spending. In other words, the grim future CBO envisions is a choice we would make by continuing along our current path. That is apparently what President Obama and his party want to do. But surely America can do better.