{"id":234028,"date":"2010-01-26T15:40:34","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T20:40:34","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.34244"},"modified":"2010-01-26T15:44:33","modified_gmt":"2010-01-26T20:44:33","slug":"the-horror-of-the-cbos-2010-economic-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/234028","title":{"rendered":"The Horror of the CBO’s 2010 Economic Report"},"content":{"rendered":"

The president’s plan to freeze non-military discretionary spending<\/a> isn’t good. The new projections for this year’s economy<\/a> from the CBO are much worse. They project a $1.3 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2010, the second largest as a share of GDP since WWII. They project unemployment over 10 percent until mid-year, and still in the high 9s when the spending freeze bites.<\/p>\n

In short, we’re trapped.<\/p>\n

Unemployment is so high that it’s costing us billions in government
\nrevenues, but the instinct to rein in spending could potentially cost even more. Obama wants to demonstrate — to voters, to moderate
\nRepublicans, to international investors — that he’s serious about
\ntackling the deficit. Ironically, the way he’s chosen to do that is by
\nfreezing all spending except the parts that impact security and entitlements.
\nBut the main drivers of our deficit are, well, military spending and
\nentitlements. He’s demonstrating his dragon-slaying potential by fighting a dragonfly.<\/p>\n

A spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner likened the freeze to<\/a>
\n“announcing you’re going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest.”
\nWell, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. If you’re a fat person who’s
\njust won a pie-eating contest, you should start dieting eventually<\/i>!
\nNo, this freeze is more like a pie-eating champion announcing that his weight-loss plan is to stop drinking cafe lattes. The gesture is only marginally related
\nto his weight gain (he’s a pie-eating champ, after all), and it might
\neven backfire by making him more sluggish.


\n

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The president’s plan to freeze non-military discretionary spending isn’t good. The new projections for this year’s economy from the CBO are much worse. They project a $1.3 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2010, the second largest as a share of GDP since WWII. They project unemployment over 10 percent until mid-year, and still in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234028\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}