Newspaper: Obama budget projections 'laughably implausible'

White House estimates of a $9 trillion budget deficit over the next 10 years ($2 trillion more than the White House predicted just a few months ago) are still way off the real deficit projections, according to an editorial in The Wall Street Journal.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts that debt held by the public as a share of GDP, which was 40.8% in 2008, will rise to 67.8% in 2019 — and then keep climbing after that, says the newspaper.

The CBO says this is "unsustainable," but even this forecast may be optimistic, the newspaper says.

From the editorial:

The real fiscal crisis in Washington is that neither Congress nor the White House are offering any escape from these trillion-dollar deficits. Mr. Obama has not called for automatic and immediate spending cuts. He has not proposed eliminating hundreds of wasteful programs. To the contrary, the White House still hasn't ruled out another fiscal stimulus, as if a $1.6 trillion deficit isn't Keynesian stimulus enough. The Administration's celebrated scrub through the budget this summer identified $17 billion in agency savings. That's what Uncle Sam is borrowing every three days.

Obamanomics has turned into an unprecedented experiment in runaway government with no plan to pay for it, save, perhaps, for a big future toll on the middle class such as a value-added tax. White House budget director Peter Orszag promises that next year's budget will have a "plan to put the nation on a fiscally sustainable path." Hide the children.

Read the full editorial, "The Pelosi-Obama Deficits," at the newspaper's Web site.

Originally posted at TONY PHYRILLAS