Report: CBO's January 2015 Budget and Economic Outlook

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its Budget and Economic Outlook today, showing their budget and economic forecasts through 2025. After falling to post-recession lows below $470 billion this year and next, CBO projects deficits will again start to rise, exceeding $1 trillion by 2025.

Over the next decade, CBO projects deficits of $7.6 trillion (3.3 percent of GDP), with deficits growing from a low of $467 billion (2.5 percent of GDP) in 2016 to $1.09 trillion (4.0 percent of GDP) by 2025.

As a result, debt will rise over the next decade, from $13 trillion today to $16.6 trillion at the end of 2020 and $21.6 trillion by the end of 2025. As a share of GDP, debt will remain stable at current post-war highs of about 74 percent of GDP through 2020, but then rise continuously to almost 79 percent of GDP by 2025 and continue to grow unsustainably over the long run.

The gloomy debt and deficit outlook is the result of rising spending and relatively flat revenue collection. Despite discretionary spending falling as a share of GDP, Social Security, health care, and interest spending will grow substantially, pushing spending from 20.3 percent of GDP in 2015 to 22.3 percent by 2025. At the same time, revenue will remain roughly flat at near 18 percent of GDP through most of the next ten years, reaching 18.3 in 2025.

Compared to their prior projections, released last August, deficits are about $175 billion lower through 2024 – almost entirely due to changes in 2016 through 2018. However, long-term economic projections have also worsened – with nominal GDP about 1 percent lower in 2024 – resulting in a slightly higher debt-to-GDP ratio by 2024.

Even these projections assume that lawmakers do not enact new deficit-increasing policies. If they act irresponsibly and extend temporary policies and repeal scheduled cuts, debt would be much worse and could reach 88 percent of GDP by 2025.

Overall, CBO’s baseline shows a fiscal outlook which is clearly unsustainable. Correcting this course will require reducing the gap between spending and revenue by enacting serious tax and entitlement reforms. The longer policymakers wait, the more difficult they will find it to put our fiscal house in order.