Gloomy CBO report on deficit highlights where Obama has brought us

Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path-meaning that federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run. Although great uncertainty surrounds longterm fiscal projections, rising costs for health care and the aging of the U.S. population will cause federal spending to increase rapidly under any plausible scenario for current law. Unless revenues increase just as rapidly, the rise in spending will produce growing budget deficits and accumulating debt. Keeping deficits and debt from reaching levels that would cause substantial harm to the economy would require increasing revenues significantly as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), decreasing projected spending sharply, or some combination of the two.

For decades, spending on the federal government's major health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, has been growing faster than the economy (as has health care spending in the private sector). The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that if current laws do not change, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid combined will grow from roughly 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent by 2035 (what this report describes as the intermediate term) and to more than 17 percent by 2080 (what this report considers to be the long term). That projection means that in 2080, without changes in policy, the federal government would be spending almost as much, as a share of the economy, on just its two major health care programs as it has spent on all of its programs and services in recent years.