Washington Pundits Are So Cute When They Try To Figure Out the Obvious

Robert Samuelson's column lays out the factors that caused the huge surplus predicted for the last decade by the Congressional Budget Office to turn into a huge deficit. Samuelson cites analysis of the $12 trillion shift from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and two "non-partisan" groups, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and the Pew Fiscal Initiative.

Samuelson and these groups are careful to say that blame for this shift is widely shared, but that the largest chunk stems f...