Washington, Jul 1 (EFE) .- The US budget deficit will reach 3 trillion dollars this year, while the US economy will grow 7.4% in 2021, its fastest pace since 1984, predicted this Thursday the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Projections from the CBO, a nonpartisan federal agency, suggest that the deficit will be the second-largest in US history since 1945, behind only the one recorded in 2020, during the pandemic, which was 3.1 trillion.
This year’s deficit will account for 13.4% of GDP and will be triple that registered in 2019, before the crisis derived from covid-19, according to the report.
The CBO attributes much of the increase in the deficit to the stimulus package of 1.9 trillion dollars approved by Congress in March, but takes into account that this measure is temporary, so it forecasts that the deficit will fall to 1.2 trillion in 2022.
In the long term, the growth of the economy will allow the fiscal outlook to improve in the United States, and the accumulated deficit between 2022 and 2031 will be 12.1 trillion, 1% less than what the CBO had predicted last February.
The deficit will decrease significantly in 2023, when it will not reach 800,000 million, but in 2025 it will begin to grow again and will close to 1.9 trillion in 2031, the office calculates.
As for debt, it is expected to reach 23 trillion dollars by the end of this year, that is, 103% of GDP, a level slightly lower than the forecast in February.
Starting next year, the debt will fall slightly, but it will rise again from 2025 and will reach 106% of GDP in 2031, which will equal the record set in 1946 for the largest in the country’s history, said the CBO.
Regarding inflation, the CBO predicts that it will rise “drastically” this year, but then it will “moderate”, with an increase of 2.8% in 2021 and a decrease to 2% in 2022, and then remain stable until 2025, a projection similar to the one advanced by the Federal Reserve (Fed).
