House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan announced the GOP budget for Fiscal Year 2011 – a reduction of $74 billion from the President’s proposed budget (National Journal).
That’s a roughly 2% reduction in the growth of spending (from 7% to 5%). That doesn’t seem like much, but I ran through the numbers what would happen if, say, budget growth was 2% lower than projected for the entire decade (based on CBO numbers here).
Keep in mind, CBO projects the “as is” budgets (annual growth rate: 5%) to have deficits of over $600 billion as far as the eye can see.
Cut the annual growth rate to 3% on average, and the budget balances in six years.
Something to keep in mind; this may seem a small step, but it is a step, and more like these can turn things around more quickly than we realize.
[...] Cross-posted to RWL [...]
Those numbers are reliant on a massive increase in tax revenue that is never going to happen. The Ryan plan is insufficient. The GOP has failed once again in record time.