Lockbox Unlocked
After visiting Pew’s site, I wandered over to the CBO where I found the latest Monthly Budget Review. It contains the current CBO (-$477b) and OMB ($-527b) deficit projections. One suprising element is that the administration’s forecast (the OMB number) is $50b higher than the basically non-partisan CBO’s estimate.
More interesting is this table:
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| CURRENT PROJECTIONS FOR FISCAL YEAR 2004 (Billions of dollars) |
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| CBO | OMB | ||||
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| Receipts | 1,817 | 1,791 | |||
| Outlays | 2,294 | 2,319 | |||
| Deficit | -477 | -527 | |||
| On-budget deficit | -631 | -682 | |||
| Off-budget surplus | 154 | 154 | |||
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| Sources: Office of Management and Budget; CBO. | |||||
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What is the $154b “off-budget surplus” number? That’s money for the Social Security trust fund. In other words, the progressive income, capital gains, dividend, and corporate taxes are bringing in between $630 and $690 billion less than the government is spending. Only when the money raised by the regressive payroll tax is included does the deficit fall to a mere one-half trillion dollars.
AB