Last March, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its projection of deficits that would result from President Obama budget: $9.3 trillion from 2010 to 2019. That same day, Peter Orszag, the director of the president’s Office of Management and Budget, defended the OMB’s much rosier (but still appalling) estimate of $7 trillion over the same ten years, and said that the CBO was wrong.
Well, well, well. Last week, in a late Friday news dump, the White House revised its ten-year deficit estimate to $9.05 trillion, very nearly the CBO estimate. In fact, the remaining $250 billion discrepancy is accounted for by a $250 billion bank rescue contingency that was budgeted but won’t be spent.
Earlier this year, the OMB already adopted the CBO numbers for 2009. Without admitting it explicitly, the OMB is now conceding that it was wrong and the CBO was right for 2010-2019 as well. Will Orszag apologize? Not likely, but we know now that we can discard his numbers. That leaves us with just the dark red bars in the notorious we’re-screwed chart:
POSTSCRIPT: I blogged this last Friday, but I didn’t make the connection that the OMB was adopting the CBO numbers it previously criticized. Thanks to Power Line for pointing that out.
UPDATE: CNN gives the new deficit figure as $9.05 trillion, rather than the round $9 trillion figure I had before. That completely erases the discrepancy between the old CBO number and the new OMB number. I’ve edited the post accordingly.
UPDATE: On the other hand, the CBO has revised its projection to be rosier. Go figure.
Internet Scofflaw 
You must be logged in to post a comment.