Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, June 19 2018: “House Budget Committee Chairman Steve Womack (R-AR) released his Chairman’s Mark of the House FY 2019 budget resolution. The budget resolution calls for $8.1 trillion of deficit reduction (including rosy growth and other gimmicks), while including reconciliation instructions for committees to enact at least $302 billion over a decade. As we said in a recent press release, proposing a budget is an important first step in the budget process and reconciliation instructions are an important tool for deficit reduction, but much more would need to be done to truly fix the debt. As written, the budget reaches balance by 2027. Deficits would fall steadily from $805 billion (4 percent of GDP) in 2018 to $146 billion (0.5 percent of GDP) by 2026 before producing a $142 billion (0.4 percent of GDP) surplus in 2028. The budget achieves these low deficits in part with extremely rosy economic assumptions. Removing these assumptions, the deficit would total $238 billion (0.8 percent of GDP) by 2028…”