John Hinderaker, of Power Line, commented on President Obama’s plan to pay down the national debt, as demonstrated by Obama’s mid-year budget plan update. Obama also is campaigning on his plan to “pay down the debt in a balanced way.”
Here’s what his “balanced plan” does to our national debt, illustrated by the following graph from Power Line, and The Washington Times.
That’s a rather startling increase in the size of this paid-down debt. “But wait,” some of you might object. “What about the debt as a per cent of our GDP, a perhaps better way to assess the size of our debt?”
Our 2011 GDP was some $15 trillion, and it’s projected to be in the neighborhood of $24 trillion by 2021 (my calculation based on data in Table 1-6 of the CBO’s report “Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2011 to 2021.”
That makes our national debt 98.7% of GDP in 2011, and 105.8% of GDP by 2021. This is how Obama intends to “pay down the debt in a balanced way” via Obamanomics’ New Math.