off the charts
POLICY INSIGHT
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
Controversy has arisen over the amount of deficit reduction in President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget. Politifact last week questioned the validity of a CBPP analysis estimating that the Obama budget would reduce deficits by $3.8 trillion over ten years; Politifact suggested that the actual figure is below $3 trillion. Careful fact-checking shows, however, that our number is sound. The Politifact article went astray in several respects.
Our $3.8 trillion figure has two components (see graph):
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- $2.2 trillion in savings from policies proposed in the President’s budget. (This figure does not include any savings from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which we did not give the budget credit.)
- $1.7 trillion in savings from discretionary spending cuts that policymakers enacted last year, primarily from the Budget Control Act’s caps on discretionary spending. Those savings, which will occur over the 2013-2022 period, implement the lion’s share of the discretionary cuts that the report from presidential deficit commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson called for. (The $1.7 trillion figure includes the interest savings on the national debt that these discretionary cuts will produce.)
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