The Congressional Budget Office issued its Long-Term Budget Outlook for 2022 last week. The CBO’s view of the U.S. government’s fiscal future is, as always, really depressing. However, the new report drives home what the CBO’s analysts see as the most prominent fiscal threat to Americans: the U.S. national debt.
The analysts don’t come flat out and say it, but that’s the clear takeaway from the figures they used to illustrate the report’s visual summary. Here is the closely related pair of charts they’ve used to send that message:
Here’s their caption for these charts:
In CBO’s projections, primary deficits grow in most years and
