"CBO's Scary Debt Chart Not Looking Very Scary These Days"

Kevin Drum @ Mother Jones:

The CBO's latest budget projections are out today. Here's the scary debt chart:


Hmmm. Not so scary after all. The CBO's projections are, of course, sensitive to both their economic forecasts and their reliance on current law. However, their economic forecast seems fairly conservative, and current law is a lot more reliable now than it was before we decided what to do about the Bush tax cuts. So CBO's projections are probably fairly reasonable.

You can decide for yourself, of course, whether you find this debt projection scary even though it's flat for the next decade. Maybe you think it needs to decline to give us more headroom for the future. Maybe you think it masks the problem of growing debt after 2023. Maybe you think we're likely to have another recession over the next decade, which will balloon the debt yet again.