The Hill reports that in a rare 100-0 roll call vote “The Senate voted unanimously Tuesday to tell the public when it isn’t paying for new spending or tax cuts.” The amendment, which would be applied to the job bill, “would create a running tally on the secretary of the Senate’s website of any new mandatory spending that isn’t paid for through offsetting spending cuts or tax increases.”
Still, “Coburn wasn’t optimistic over the chances his proposal will end up becoming law.” That is because Democrats may replace it with one authored by Sen. Max Baucus “that requires the Secretary of the Senate to create a new website that links to Congressional Budget Office information,” and “would only be updated every three months.”
Sadly, no such amendment apply the spending the President doesn’t acknowledge he is going to be pending.
Here is a chart that shows the projected deficits in the president’s FY2011 budget side-by-side with the projected deficits in the most recent CBO report.
One striking sentence in the report on p. 2:
“Under the President’s budget, debt held by the public would grow from $7.5 trillion (53 percent of GDP) at the end of 2009 to $20.3 trillion (90 percent of GDP) at the end of 2020. As a result, net interest would more than quadruple between 2010 and 2020 in nominal dollars (without an adjustment for inflation); it would expand from 1.4 percent of GDP in 2010 to 4.1 percent in 2020.”