Report: Analysis of the President’s FY 2016 Budget

Today, the President released his FY 2016 budget, laying out his priorities and proposals for the coming year. The budget includes policies and initiatives to reform immigration, taxes, and Medicare, while promoting early and higher education, reducing low-income and middle-class taxes, repealing a portion of future sequester cuts, and implementing other tax and spending changes.

Our main findings from the budget are:

• The President’s budget includes sufficient revenue and spending cuts to pay for his new initiatives and reduce deficits by about $930 billion relative to current law over the next decade. Relative to the President’s baseline, the budget includes $2.2 trillion of deficit reduction.
• Based on its own projections, debt under the President’s budget would remain relatively stable as a share of GDP, reaching 73 percent of GDP in 2025 compared to 74 percent today. In dollar terms, debt will rise from about $13 trillion today to over $20 trillion by 2025.
• Deficits under the President’s budget would remain steady over the course of the decade at about 2.5 percent of GDP each year.
• Between 2015 and 2025, spending will grow from 20.9 percent of GDP to 22.2 percent and revenue from 17.7 percent of GDP to 19.7 percent. Historically, they have averaged 20.1 and 17.4 percent, respectively.

Interest costs alone, in the budget, will grow from under $230 billion (1.3 percent of GDP) today to nearly $800 billion (2.8 percent of GDP) in 2025.

The President’s budget should be commended for responsibly identifying tax and spending offsets sufficient to pay for new spending and tax cuts, and setting aside additional savings for deficit reduction beyond that.

However, the budget does far too little to reduce current debt levels nor slow the growth of entitlement spending over the long-run. Under the President’s budget, debt remains roughly twice as high as in 2007 and higher than any time in history other than around World War II. Meanwhile, Social Security and Medicare remain on paths toward insolvency and both programs – along with interest spending – will continue to grow rapidly.

Ultimately, significant entitlement reforms will be necessary to put the debt on a sustainable path. And the longer we wait to enact these reforms, the larger and more abrupt they will need to be.

Update (2/4): Figure 3 has been updated to incorporate official Treasury Department estimates on the extension of the refundable tax credit expansions.