In The Red

John Cassidy looks at past and future budget projections:

The CBO’s projections show the budget deficit declining from 9.2 per cent of GDP this year to 2.7 per cent in 2014. But this assumes three things will happen that are unlikely: Congress will allow all of the Bush tax cuts to expire; it will refrain from fiddling with the Alternative Minimum Tax, allowing it to ensnare more and more Americans; it will restrict the growth of appropriations to the rate of inflation. What about the fiscal outlook in the real world? Here’s the key sentence in the entire CBO report:

If the tax cuts were made permanent, the AMT was indexed for inflation, and annual appropriations kept pace with GDP, the deficit in 2020 would be nearly the same, historically large, share of GDP that it is today, and debt held by the public would equal nearly 100 percent of GDP.