Countdown to Letdown: Awaiting the Next Obama Budget

Last year, the Obama administration released the FY2012 Budget that, if implemented, would have worsened an already bleak fiscal trajectory. In a rare showing of unanimity, the Senate rejected it. The debt has since met and exceeded the size of our economy, far surpassing the 90 percent threshold past which nations typically see a growth penalty of 1 percent of GDP, costing the U.S. 1 million jobs annually. Any budget that doesn’t propose structural changes to the nation’s tax and entitlement programs would fail to meet the challenges posed by the scope and scale of the U.S. fiscal woes. If the administration’s Budgets are any indication, we should expect the FY2013 Budget to fail this test.