Deficit, Debt Seen Spiraling Out of Control

Thursday, August 6, 2009 10:36 AM

By: Dan Weil

If you think the budget deficit and national debt are in bad shape now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

So say Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and William Gale, vice president of the Brookings Institution.

“By 2019, even if everything goes the way the Obama administration wants, and the economy recovers and grows steadily over the next decade, the deficit will be 5.5 percent of GDP,â€