I'm not terribly impressed with President Obama's plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years. Why? Well, for one thing, I don't see how he's going to manage defense cuts of the magnitude he's talking about, or further reductions in Medicare and Medicaid beyond what's already planned. For another, the CBO estimates the 10-year cumulative deficit under the current Obama budget at $9.5 trillion. So, even if hell gets a hockey team--that is, even if we get the whole $4 trillion in savings that Obama has promised--we'd STILL be racking up $5.5 trillion in debt over the decade.
Doesn't wow me.
Footnote: Even so, Paul Krugman will inevitably declare that President Obama has gone over to the dark side by accepting the Republicans' assumptions about the necessity of balancing the budget, and by accepting that most of the narrowing of the gap has to come from spending cuts.
He will also inevitably recommend that President Obama spend the $4 trillion instead on R&D related to time travel that, once rendered practical, will enable the president to journey back to early 2009 and adopt a much larger stimulus package.
The existence of the larger stimulus package would, however, nullify approximately 98% of Krugman's subsequent columns...though I suppose that in this re-running of history, he'd just devote those columns instead to more detailed depictions of Republicans as vicious, lying idiots.
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