Debt and Deficits: The Obama Factor
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- Current Debt: The total Public Debt stands at over $15.4 trillion, with FY2011’s $1.3 trillion deficit, 8.7 percent of GDP, having contributed significantly to our nation’s credit card bill.
- The Obama’s Administration’s Credit Card Bill after its First 1122 days in Office:
- Debt increase since inauguration = $4.8 trillion
- Debt increase per day in office = $4.3 billion
- Debt increase per person since inauguration = $15,288
- The Ten-Year Deficit Outlook: The Obama administration’s budget would continue to contribute to the debt by running massive deficits for the next ten years, averaging $731 billion annually from 2012 to 2021.
- Interest Costs: Even under OMB’s rosy fiscal projections, by 2021, interest payments under the President’s budget meet the historical record as share of GDP (3.3percent of GDP by 2021; meeting the 3.3 percent in interest paid in 1991).
- Interest grows from $230 billion in 2011 to $850 billion in 2022, consuming 17 cents out of every dollar of revenue (compared to roughly 10 cents per dollar in 2010).
- Increasing Foreign Ownership: According to the most recent data, foreign holdings of U.S. Treasuries stands at $4.7 trillion, or 45 percent of debt held by the public.
- Of this total amount held outside the U.S, foreign government holdings of U.S. debt stand at $3.2 trillion, or 31 percent of debt held by the public.
- China, the U.S.’s largest foreign creditor, has holdings of $1.1 trillion (11 percent of U.S. debt held by the public).
- Federal interest payments on foreign-owned debt have increased by over 50 percent since 2000, rising from $85 billion to $136 billion in 2010.
- Long Term Budget Outlook: The U.S. long-term fiscal pathway is unsustainable. Assuming many of the current fiscal policies remain in place, CBO projects that debt held by the public will reach 187 percent of GDP in 2035 – well above any level seen in U.S. history.
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