There is one extremely major flaw in the CBO projections. They assume that each and every year will be an average year and that no significant changes in taxing and spending will occur. Becoming complacent about the deficit because of those assumptions is sheer lunacy. The idea that we won't have another recession in the next few decades that causes the government to stimulate the economy by providing tax cuts, extended safety net programs and/or infrastructure spending is simply not in keeping with experience or with good public policy.
Countercyclical spending works, but has as a political defect that politicians have generally been loath to run the necessary surpluses in good times needed to sustain them in the long term. The last thing our idiot congresscritters of either party need to hear is we don't need to worry about the deficit in the long term. Now we don't need a drastic ten-year plan to eliminate the national debt. Indeed, we don't need to eliminate the debt, tho it would be nice to trim it. What we do need to do is get our deficit sufficiently under control that we do run some modest surpluses from time to time. As I said earlier, our economy is doing marginally okay, but could be better so for now a roughly balanced budget, with a slight shading towards minor deficit spending should be our goal.
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