The Senate Budget Committee Republican staff under Ranking Member Jeff Sessions [R-AL] on Thursday released this really, really gloomy chart:
The national debt will surpass $20 trillion by 2016?
“On the heels of yesterday’s Congressional Budget Office finding that the U.S. will experience its fourth consecutive deficit in excess of a trillion dollars this fiscal year, it is worth examining what the President’s budget proposes for the next four fiscal years,” Sen. Sessions office said in a statement.
Aided by data from the Treasury and the OMB’s Fiscal Year 2013 Mid-Session Review, the senator’s office compiled the following list of startling facts:
- Under the President’s budget policies, federal debt will increase to $25.4 trillion by the end of 2022, an increase of $10.6 trillion (72 percent).
- Federal debt at the end of the current fiscal year will stand at $16.2 trillion—$6.2 trillion above where it was 4 years earlier.
- In the last 4 years, the debt increased by more than it did in the previous 17 years.
- The $1.8 trillion in tax hikes in the President’s budget finance $1.4 trillion in spending above projected growth, not deficit reduction.
- Debt will remain permanently elevated above 100 percent of GDP -- a level of debt that economists believe results in weaker growth and millions of lost jobs.
Meanwhile, it's been over three years since the Democrat-controlled Senate has passed a budget.
That is all.
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