Opinion: Reining in Deficits or Piling Them On?

(Feb. 1) -- One message the White House clearly wants to deliver with its new fiscal-year 2011 budget is that it's making "tough choices."

In a blog post this morning, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said, "During these tough economic times, American families are forced to make tough choices about what they can spend money on and what they need to cut from their household budgets. Through the course of the budget process, we did the same thing."

And in his statement today, President Barack Obama talked up "the steps we're taking to rein in deficits." Things like $20 billion in program cuts this year, and the proposed spending freeze on domestic programs, which the administration says will save $250 billion over the next decade.

It sounds good, and is no doubt meant to be reassuring to those worried about a tsunami of federal red ink. But a closer look at the budget reveals a strikingly different picture than the White House's spin -- one characterized by substantial increases in federal spending and deficits, both in 2011 and over the next 10 years.

To see this, you need to do a little compare-and-contrast exercise.

Just last week, the Congressional Budget Office released a report showing what would happen to federal spending and deficits over the next 10 years without any changes in federal policies. That's what the CBO calls the "baseline" budget.

The picture was bleak. Absent any policy changes, next year's deficit would be nearly $1 trillion. Over the next decade, annual deficits would total $6 trillion.

But as bad as that picture is, the White House budget makes things far worse. If Obama gets his way, the deficit for next year will be $1.3 trillion, and the total red ink for the decade will be $8.5 trillion. (See chart below.)

In other words, it appears that Obama's budget would boost deficits by 29 percent next year and 41 percent over the next decade.

On the spending side, Obama's budget would increase spending by almost $200 billion in 2011 and $3 trillion over the next decade, compared with the CBO's baseline.

Now maybe that's not a fair comparison, since the CBO might use different assumptions to build its spending and deficit baseline. The federal budget is notoriously sensitive to such assumptions.

But here's another way to look at it: Obama's new budget calls for spending in 2011 that is 6 percent higher than the White House forecast in its own budget last year, and produces a deficit that is 39 percent higher.

In any case, if adding more than $8.5 trillion to the national debt in 10 years is what passes for "tough choices" in Washington, the country is really headed for trouble.