President Barack Obama’s budget proposal would add $6.4 trillion in deficits over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The nonpartisan agency, in an analysis today of the administration’s February budget request, said it would produce a deficit of almost $1 trillion in 2013.
The blockbuster report demolishes White House claims last month that the Obama budget would reduce deficits by $3.2 trillion over the next decade.
The CBO arrived at the huge figure even after taking into account reduced war costs.
“The differences between the estimates from CBO and the White House budget office are attributable to different baselines and economic assumptions, and a big reason CBO expects the deficit to spike sharply under Obama's budget is that CBO's baseline assumes all the Bush-era tax rates will expire at the end of 2012,” The Hill reported.
Obama wants to continue the middle-class tax cuts, something reflected in his budget.
CBO estimates that the $365 billion increase to the deficit in 2013 would be caused by proposals in Obama’s budget that increase spending by $137 billion and that decrease revenue by $228 billion.
In total, the Obama budget spends $3.7 trillion next year and proposes generating $1.5 trillion from new taxes over 10 years.
Obama’s proposed budget would increase the size of the national debt held by the public from $10.1 trillion today to $18.8 trillion in 2022 — or 76.3 percent of the gross domestic product, according to the CBO.
The latest report is the second piece of bad news for the Obama administration this week. On Thursday, the CBO estimated that as many as 20 million Americans could lose employer-provided medical coverage because of the president's signature healthcare reform law.
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