President Barack Obama’s new fiscal commission, organized in response to a Congressional Budget Office projection that the United States will accumulate $6 trillion in debt during the next decade, is mostly for show, say three researchers from Casey Research.
Though the commission’s task is to come up with ways to limit future deficits to 3 percent of GDP, the 3 percent limit is “just a hoop for the clowns to jump through,” says Casey.
“U.S. government finances are now past the point of no return,” Casey researchers write in a report.
“The U.S. government lacks not just the will, but the ability, to close the gap between revenue and expenditure.”
“The picture painted by the CBO is by no means rosy, but we think the facts could prove to be much worse,” Casey says.
“We have already demonstrated that the CBO's assumptions can be wildly off the mark, and there are many ways for things to go wrong in the years just ahead.”
For example, the CBO projects annual government receipts will more than double during the next decade, growing at an annual rate of 7.8 percent — yet data from 2000-2009 show that receipts grew only by 0.9 percent, and the total increase in government revenue for the same period was only 3.9 percent.
The U.S. government ran a budget deficit in April of $83 billion, the Treasury Department reported, as individual income tax receipts declined sharply, MarketWatch reports.
April marked a record 19th consecutive monthly budget deficit. A year ago in April, the deficit was $20.9 billion.
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