Michael Gerson, former Bush speechwriter, in his Washington Post column today (emphasis added):
Without Republican input or influence, the budget is a tax-and-spend caricature. Obama has complained of inheriting a $1.3 trillion debt. According to economist Michael Boskin, Obama's proposals would add $6.5 trillion in debt over the next decade -- about $163,000 for every American taxpaying family.
As I'm sure most of you know, the national debt Obama inherited is actually about $10 trillion, or an order of magnitude larger than Gerson's figure. The debt is "only" $6 trillion if you don't count intragovernmental holdings like what's owed to the Social Security trust fund, so sometimes you'll see that figure cited instead. In any case, it is many, many times larger than $1.3 trillion, which is an estimate of the deficit Obama inherited, i.e., an estimate of what the 2009 deficit would be if laws and policies in effect last year had been left in place. Here is a CBO doc that lays this all out.
Now, this column went up around midnight last night. so it's been up there for more than 18 hours. I just read his column a little while ago, but I find it hard to believe I'm the first person to notice it. It boggles my mind that an error like this hasn't been fixed already. This is a major, major error. It gives the reader the impression that Obama is going to leave the country with a national debt 6 times larger than what he inherited, which is nowhere close to being true.
Also, it would be one thing if it looked like Gerson just absentmindedly typed "debt" went he meant to type "deficit", but this does not appear to be the case. It appears that he really believes the entire national debt is only around $1 trillion dollars, since otherwise it wouldn't make sense for him to compare a single-year deficit figure (which is what that $1.3 trillion figure actually is) to the $6.5 trillion in addtional debt estimated over the next decade.
I know many of you have very low opinions of how informed former Bush official are, but I nonetheless would have thought a former Bush speechwriter and current Post columnist would have a rough sense of where the national debt is. Amazing.
Anyway, please help me get this fixed:
michaelgerson@cfr.org
corrections@washpost.com
ombudsman@washpost.com
I hope it's not the Post's policy to let columnists issue their own corrections in subsequent columns days later and otherwise leave errors like this uncorrected. This should get fixed right away.
UPDATE: The Post has fixed the error. Woohoo!