As readers of The Bottom Line and our releases will know, CRFB strives to compare as many plans as possible on a similar basis so that policymakers, experts, and the public can truly see the differences between competing proposals. We do this because it's all too easy for people to get confused about various baselines and actual new savings from proposals.

In our paper on the President's budget, we noted that the budget would only temporarily stabilize the debt as a percent of GDP. In fact, it would rise from roughly 77 percent in 2022 to 93 percent in 2035 and about 125 percent in 2050. Where did those numbers come from?

In our continued analysis of the President’s budget, we now move to a detailed examination of what the budget would look like at the end of the ten-year window in 2022 and how it would change from today.

Since the release of the President’s FY 2013 budget on Monday, CRFB has provided coverage of the President’s proposal through our FY 2013 blog series.

Last year, when the President's budget used overly optimistic economic assumptions and various magic asterisks, we re-estimated their budget using more realistic assumptions. As it turns out, our estimates were quite close to CBO's estimate of the President's budget; the President claimed to get debt down to 77 percent of GDP by 2021, we estimated it would be at 87.4 percent, and CBO found it would get to 87.5 percent.

Continuing on in our blog series, we will be discussing discretionary spending proposals in the President's budget.

This installment of the FY 2013 Budget Series focuses on some of the budget process reform proposals buried deep in the Analytical Perspectives section (chapter 14, to be exact) of the President’s budget. We have long argued that reforms to the budget process are not the solution to the mounting debt the country continues to accumulate.

With President Obama's FY 2013 budget out in the open for review (see our initial reaction and analysis) we will now more closely examine many aspects of the budget in a blog series over the coming week. Our first blog will introduce the broad framework.

CRFB has just released its press release on the President's budget, including some basic analysis of the fiscal trajectory. The budget includes deficits of $6.7 trillion from 2013-2022 and would stabilize debt at over 76 percent of GDP later this decade. 

In a post earlier this week detailing what's known about the President's budget, we discussed policies that were likely to appear on Monday. Now, the National Journal (via The Wall Street Journal) has more details (subscription required) about some of the numbers we may see come Monday.