--- title: Rana Foroohar: Surprising Deficit Numbers Highlight Growth | TIME description: Surprising deficit numbers from the Congressional Budget Office sheds new light on spending cuts vs growth. TIME Assistant Managing Editor Rana Foroohar explains. canonical: https://time.com/video/eIrzbWgd/ og:title: Rana Foroohar: Surprising Deficit Numbers Highlight Growth og:description: Surprising deficit numbers from the Congressional Budget Office sheds new light on spending cuts vs growth. TIME Assistant Managing Editor Rana Foroohar explains. og:url: https://time.com/video/eIrzbWgd/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/eIrzbWgd/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Rana Foroohar: Surprising Deficit Numbers Highlight Growth twitter:description: Surprising deficit numbers from the Congressional Budget Office sheds new light on spending cuts vs growth. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Rana Foroohar: Surprising Deficit Numbers Highlight Growth [Watch (HLS stream): Rana Foroohar: Surprising Deficit Numbers Highlight Growth](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/eIrzbWgd.m3u8) (1:51)  _Published 2013-05-15. Surprising deficit numbers from the Congressional Budget Office sheds new light on spending cuts vs growth. TIME Assistant Managing Editor Rana Foroohar explains._ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:34 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Zohran Mamdani Says New Budget Has Eliminated New York City’s Deficit](/video/lzfbU5UT/) ### Zohran Mamdani Says New Budget Has Eliminated New York City’s Deficit [The Federal Deficit – A Finance Panel](/video/70mZyTRy/):55 ### The Federal Deficit – A Finance Panel [How to Interpret the 2.5% GDP Growth Rate](/video/dDSmffB4/) ### How to Interpret the 2.5% GDP Growth Rate --- ## Transcript Politics for the last couple of years have been dominated by discussions of the deficit. But the latest figures out today from the congressional budget office. A non partisan group, showed that the deficit is actually falling sharply. Estimates for 2013 have gone from 845 billion to 642 billion. A reduction of over $ 200 billion. Which is especially sharp, when you think about the fact that we had a deficit of over $ 1 trillion just last year. So what's happening? Why are the numbers changing? Well two things. First of all the housing recovery has resulted in more money for Fanny and Freddie Mac. Which are now owned by the government. The one time dividend payments have contributed to the budget reduction. The numbers also reflect the fact that the private sector is doing well. As I've reported before, if you stripped out the federal government's contribution to growth which brings us into that 2 % econom, y we've heard so much about. We'd actually be growing at 3. 1 %. If you looked at just the private sector. So that recovery is putting more tax money into the federal coffers. So, what are the ramifications of this, what does it all mean? Well for starters, it means that we're not going to have another summer of debt wrangling, of the sort that we've seen for the last couple of years. These debt discussions, debt limit discussions that we need to have, probably won't happen in July or August. But now in the second half of October. So what does this tell us in terms of what we should be thinking about with economic policy? Well, what it says, is that growing an economy is more important than cutting. We've seen in Europe that austerity, cutting budgets in order to try and pull yourself out of recession, isn't working. And we've seen here in these latest deficit productions, that when tax receipts grow, thanks to underlying growth in the economy, that deficit comes down. So, a focus on growth going forward. And bringing our economy back to its 3 % trend growth, should really be on the top of policy maker's agenda. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Rana Foroohar: Surprising Deficit Numbers Highlight Growth","description":"Surprising deficit numbers from the Congressional Budget Office sheds new light on spending cuts vs growth. 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