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The Washington PostTwo painful rounds of cost-cutting on Capitol Hill and higher-than-expected tax collections will push this year’s budget deficit down by $300 billion and slice nearly $1.5 trillion from deficits over the next decade, according to new White House projections.
But the report says that the national debt, which stands at $14.6 trillion, would still continue to climb if a budget proposed by President Obama in February were enacted. The debt would rise to $24 trillion by 2021 — or 99 percent of the nation’s entire annual economic output.
White House budget director Jacob J. Lew said that the report, released Thursday, “underscores that we need to get back on a sustainable fiscal path and that we need to invest in economic growth and job creation.”
While lawmakers approved significant spending cuts in the recent battle over the federal debt limit, Lew said, the new budget projections make clear that the Budget Control Act of 2011 “didn’t finish the job.”
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