Freedom Line Blog

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) today released its mid-year long term deficit projections.  While the  2009 deficit estimates came in at $262 billion less than predicted earlier in the year ($1.58 trillion total), OMB’s 10-year projection increased to a whopping $9 trillion, or $2 trillion more than previously estimated.

That’s a lot of money – so much, that it’s hard for the average person to even comprehend.

Fortunately, John Lott, economist and author of “Freedomonics,” has a great opinion piece today on FoxNews.com that helps put the figure in perspective.  For starters, Lott writes that the new OMB projection “likely underestimates the deficit by at least another $1 trillion,” which means the real 10-year deficit number is probably closer to $10 trillion.  Elaborating on what that means for you and your family, Lott writes:

Ten trillion dollars simply is a lot of money. Whether it is an individual going into debt or a country, spending the money now means that we have less to spend on other things. In the case of ten trillion dollars of national debt, it comes to over $33,000 per person– $130,000 for a family of four. The $130,000 is the amount of taxes that a family is going to have to pay back, somehow, and people have to ask what their family could have gotten for that much money. Is the benefit they get from the government spending all this money greater than what they could have gotten if they had spent that money themselves?