In January 2019, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published one of its recurring looks at America's likely budget and economic trajectory over the coming decade. These reports are useful for showing not just the current state of the fisc, but where nonpartisan government analysts think it will go and what might occur as a result. They offer both an of-the-moment snapshot and a rough sense of what to expect.
What the CBO said at the time was that the country's debt and deficits were on a risky, perhaps even dangerous, track.
The annual budget deficit—the gap between government spending and tax revenues—would run about $900 billion in 2019, and it would push beyond $1 trillion every year starting in 2022. Debt as a percentage of the country's total economy would rise steadily, reaching 93 percent of GDP by 2029, the highest level since the years directly following World War II.
...Again, this was the outlook in 2019, when the unemployment rate was below five percent, when the deficit was projected to run about $900 billion over a 12-month span, when daily viral death tolls and case-count heat maps weren't posted on major news sites like especially grisly weather reports.
In June of this year, the federal deficit was $864 billion.
That's more than the entire annual budget deficits of 2017 ($665 billion) or 2018 ($779 billion), more than any year during the George W. Bush administration or Barack Obama's second term. In June of 2019, the federal budget deficit was $8 billion, which almost seems like a typo now.
The reason, of course, is the federal response to the coronavirus, especially the CARES Act and various other spending bills designed to prop up the economy, which the CBO now projects won't recover for more than a decade.
No comments:
Post a Comment