By Peter Galuszka
And now for something completely different.
I read with great interest James A. Bacon Jr.s “Boomergeddon” work a couple of years ago. It printed a very bleak picture of our financial future and Jim says, “We need to cut hundreds of billions of dollars” from the federal budget.
But something has been bugging me for about a week now — news that the federal budget is actually shrinking faster than expected.
I’m not making this up. It comes from the Congressional Budget Office. It is supposed to be down to $642 billion by October and may fall to $400 billion a year or so after that, according to new projections. I gather the government is collecting more taxes, even though Apple, like General Electric, manages to pay little if any, which conservatives hate to bring up.
If I recall, the worst deficit was about $1.3 trillion. According to Jim, Obama says it will go down and then bounce up to $1 trillion by the end of the decade if there is no recession. “The reality is that a recession is inevitable,” Jim writes.
I can’t claim to know if there will be a recession before 2020 but the new budget deficit projections show the deficit growing back to the level of about $750 billion (not $1 trillion as was apparently forecast earlier).
I hate to be a nag, but where was Mr. Bacon when the news came out that the budget deficit was shrinking faster than expected and that this puts a damper in the urgency to cut budgets again and again?
So there it is. On the table. I’m counting off 10 paces. Your draw, Jimbo!
