The Congressional Budget Office is out with its score of the president’s proposed budget (dead on arrival in the House of Representatives, naturally), and it does exactly what a budget should, making the deficit larger in the short term but smaller in the medium term relative to the current law baseline*.
Doing this would not eliminate the long-term economic challenges of population aging and federal responsibility for health care needs, but it would leave us with a budget deficit that’s clearly sustainable—quite a bit smaller than the nominal growth rate of the economy, and with the debt burden shrinking.
* Update, May 20, 2013: This sentence has been modified to clarify that the Obama administration’s proposals shift in the deficit is relative to the baseline. Both Obama’s proposal and the baseline scenario involve a deficit that shrinks and then grows.
