CBO Scores Trump Budget Shrinking US Deficit By Half By 2027

There’s good news.. and bad news. CBO has just released its ‘score’ of President Trump’s proposed budget, noting that the plan would shrink the deficit by a half from their baseline by 2017 (good news). However, even accepting Trump’s dynamic scoring and 5% growth expectations, CBO is unable to balance the budget and Yellen’s recent “US debt is unsustainable” warning seems ever more prescient.
Trump’s budget would shrink notably from the CBO baseline…
According to CBO’s estimates, the deficit would fall from the $693 billion projected for 2017 to $593 billion in 2018 under the President’s proposals. After that, the deficit would generally rise, totaling $720 billion in 2027. The cumulative deficit over the 2018 – 2027 period would total $6.8 trillion. Measured as a percentage of output, the deficit would decline from 3.6 percent of GDP in 2017 to 2.6 percent at the end of the period. The deficit would average 2.9 percent through 2027. (The average deficit over the past 50?years has equaled 2.8 percent of GDP.) Those estimates exclude any macroeconomic feedback effects.
This is still a big deficit, and coming a day after Janet Yellen warned that the US debt situation was unsustainable, it seems more prescient than ever to focus on spending cuts.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jul 13, 2017.