[quote=earlyretirement]Excellent. Thanks for sharing.[/quote]

No, it’s really not so excellent. It is almost worthless. Much of it is based on a wholly bogus premise:

Just take a look at their [the CBO] 2002 projection, after passage of the Bush tax cuts:

The CBO predicted the FY2012 surplus would be $641 billion, the national debt would total $3.5 trillion, the debt held by the public would total $1.273 trillion, and GDP would total $17.2 trillion. They missed by that much.

The actual FY12 results were:

The true deficit was $1.37 trillion (amount national debt increased – not the phony deficit number reported by the mainstream media).
The national debt was $16.1 trillion.
The debt held by the public was $11.3 trillion.
GDP was $15.8 trillion.
Based on these results, I won’t be asking the CBO for help with my Super Bowl bet. Making ten year predictions is beyond worthless, but public policy in Washington DC is based on these useless CBO projections.

Why was that projection off? Well it’s true that projections 10 years out are problematic to begin with. They are based on laws and regulations remaining unchanged. That doesn’t happen. At least 4 different things happened between the 2002 CBO projection for 2012, and 2012.

1. Tax cuts passed in 2002 were scheduled to go into effect in 2006. Subsequent legislation moved those cuts up by 3 years, to 2003, cutting revenues by trillions of dollars.

2. War in Afghanistan ultimately added trillions to expenditures.

3. War in Iraq ultimately added trillions to expenditures.

4. Credit crisis/Mortgage crisis both reduced revenues by trillions of dollars and remediation increased expenditures by trillions of dollars.

When an entire an argument is based on a faulty premise, then the argument itself is of no value. This one fits that description perfectly.