Last year, Democrats in Congress didn't even bother to pass a budget. Given the increases proposed in the White House budget released Monday, it might behoove Congress to rinse, lather and repeat. Last November, Barack Obama's very own deficit commission recommended that federal spending be cut by $4 trillion over the next decade -- which is still far too little for our liking -- but Obama must have misunderstood. He apparently thought they meant he should spend $4 trillion this year.
The administration's budget proposal sets federal spending for fiscal 2012 at $3.73 trillion, yet another dubious new record for this administration. The deficit for the '12 budget would be $1.65 trillion, or 10.9 percent of GDP, also a record. That would bring the total national debt equal to the worth of the entire U.S. economy, or $15 trillion. Yet Obama has the chutzpah to tout the shamelessly inadequate spending cuts in his budget.
Erskine Bowles, a Clinton administration lackey who co-chaired Obama's deficit commission, was far closer to the mark when he said that the White House's proposal is "nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare." Even Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner asserted that it would leave the nation with "unsustainable obligations over time."
As for the "cuts" and "savings," The Wall Street Journal notes, "Although the White House trumpets $2.18 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade, those savings are so far off in the magical 'out years' that you can barely see them from here."
Perhaps most appalling is Obama's utter failure to address entitlement spending -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- which together constitute the majority of federal spending. Even the liberal Washington Post gets it: "President Obama's budget kicks the hard choices further down the road," said the headline of its recent editorial, which also criticized the president for his budgetary "gimmickry." In other words, the necessary cuts won't happen unless House Republicans begin to undertake the hard work right now.
One of the reasons Obama can claim deficit reduction is the old tax trick -- raise taxes and count on exact revenue increases, completely ignoring the negative effect that doing so will have on the economy. In fact, the White House anticipates economic growth of more than 4 percent in the next three to four years, which is a full percentage point higher than most private economists or the Congressional Budget Office project.
The budget anticipates that taxes on the top two income brackets will rise in 2013, and it includes raising the capital gains tax to 20 percent from 15 percent plus new taxes on energy companies totaling $300 billion. On top of that, the administration is seeking 5,100 additional IRS agents to reduce the estimated $300 billion in unpaid taxes. All told, Obama is counting on $1.5 trillion in new tax revenue -- money taken out of the economy to pay for more government. He keeps calling that government spending "investment," as if that makes it acceptable.
Under this budget, the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for overseeing the implementation of ObamaCare (despite a judge's recent ruling that the law is unconstitutional, we might add), will become the nation's first $1 trillion department by 2014. "In fact," says CNSNews editor Terence Jeffrey, "HHS already is costing American taxpayers more per year in inflation-adjusted dollars than the entire federal government cost back in 1965, the year President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed Medicare into law." This year's total is $909.7 billion, which is $170 billion more than the Department of Defense.
About his budget, Obama claimed, "Just like every family in America, the federal government has to do two things at once: It has to live within its means while still investing in the future. If your family [is] trying to cut back, you might skip going out to dinner, you might put off a vacation, but you wouldn't want to sacrifice saving for your kids' college education or making key repairs in your house. So you cut back on what you can't afford to focus on what you can't do without, and that's what we've done with this year's budget." Such a claim is absurd. House Republicans should lead the charge against it.
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