We may need 11 x 17 paper before too long (UPDATED)

(UPDATE #1): The CBO released its budget figures today and to say it's ugly would be a mild understatement.

Budget office figures released Monday would add $89 billion to the 2009 red ink -- increasing it to more than four times last year's all-time high as the government hands out billions more than expected for people who have lost jobs and takes in less tax revenue from people and companies making less money.

The unprecedented deficit figures flow from the deep recession, the Wall Street bailout and the cost of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus bill -- as well as a seemingly embedded structural imbalance between what the government spends and what it takes in.

(emphasis, ours)

embedded structural imbalance....

That about sums it up, now doesn't it?

And dig this:

Just a few days ago, Obama touted an administration plan to cut $17 billion in wasteful or duplicative programs from the budget next year. The erosion in the deficit announced Monday is five times the size of those savings.

The author of this article is just piling-on, now.

But it's not this Administration's fault and proving that bloggers don't know what the hell they are talking about...

"The deficits ... are driven in large part by the economic crisis inherited by this administration," budget director Peter Orszag wrote in a blog entry on Monday.

Good grief. Granted, Team O inherited a crappy economy but they did not inherit having to pay for porkulus and they did not inherit a $3.6 trillion budget for FY 2010. We'd also like to point out that the President certainly did his part while in the Senate voting in favor of the Bush-initiated spending.

This Administration's penchant for blaming the previous administration for this sort of stuff is both childish and misleading.

And maybe now people will start to get an idea of what these Tea Parties are all about.

(here endeth the update)


A few posts back, we linked to an article here that talked about private investors sitting out the recovery effort because of the completely schizophrenic and thuggish behavior of the Treasury Dept. and the Administration. And now because of weak demand for Treasury bonds, the government is having to offer higher interest rates on bonds in order to sell them.

Recall that both the Administration’s and the Congressional Budget Office’s deficit projections are based on the sale of bonds at set interest rates and a growing economy via the stimulus bill that hasn’t happened yet (because we all know that porkulus had nothing to do with actual stimulus… how does hiring more people to wipe the rear ends of old people in nursing homes actually stimulate the economy?).




So, with having to pay out on higher interest rates, we will have to spend even more which, of course, means it's entirely reasonable to assume that those downward projecting red and pink lines will be getting even longer.

This is bad. Very, very bad. And we think this story deserves more attention than its getting.

With investors going away, and other revenue-generating schemes getting shut down because of coordinated lobbying efforts, there remains really only one other alternative to raising the money needed to pay down the debt and fund the Great Society II. But, again, we will refrain from any dubious speculation as talking about what the President may be "planning" to do is irresponsible.