When US President Donald Trump unveiled his “big, beautiful bill” (BBB) last month, critics used data from Washington’s Congressional Budget Office to attack it.
The reason? The CBO is tasked with projecting the long-term US fiscal outlook. And even before that BBB initiative, with its trillions of dollars of tax cuts, the CBO’s baseline scenario — using unchanged policies and fundamentals — was that debt will jump from its current 100 per cent of GDP to 156 per cent by 2055.
However, there is a crucial, and little-noticed, caveat that matters enormously right now: while the CBO’s baseline projections grab all the attention, it recently produced eight other forecasts showing the possible impact of shifting fundamentals.