The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities compares the administration's budget to continuing current policies:
Despite claims that President Obama’s policies will generate big increases in deficits, his 2011 budget would actually reduce deficits by about $1.3 trillion over ten years, based on a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate of his budget and a realistic assessment of what deficits would be if policymakers continued to follow current tax and spending policies. ...
By itself, the budget does not do enough to put the nation on a sound fiscal footing, as the President has acknowledged. According to CBO, the President’s proposals would shrink the deficit to 4.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2014, but the gap between spending and revenues would then worsen again — reaching 5.6 percent of GDP in 2020. Many analysts have coalesced around 3 percent of GDP as a reasonable target for the deficit in the second half of the decade; the President’s proposals would not accomplish that.