If you're like me, you can't wait for an excuse to head on over to the historical tables of the president's budget and grab some data to make a couple of graphs. O.K., so you're not like me in that respect, because you're not a weirdo. But I am, so when I saw that the Congressional Budget Office had come up with its latest budget projections, I knew it was graph time.
The good news is that the deficit in 2014 was $483 billion, or 2.8 percent of GDP. While that would be a lot of money to have in your bank account, it's the lowest deficit since 2007, and lower than the average of the last 40 years. It's also a spectacular reduction since its height in 2009, when it was $1.4 trillion and almost 10 percent of GDP. Now...on to the graphs! (A note: I've used the CBO's assumption of 2 percent inflation over the next decade to obtain the figures for real dollars.) We start with the deficit in dollars, then as a proportion of GDP.
Keep in mind that the projections could be right or wrong; for all we know, there could be a world war in 2020 or the virtual reality economy could explode in 2022, bringing an unprecedented era of wealth and tax revenue. But on the whole, things are looking pretty good, given where we were a few years ago.
