It’s nothing new for presidents to give us bloated budgets with phony promises of belt-tightening at the end of the day. But never, ever, in the history of the republic has there been so irresponsibly gargantuan a budget defended by rhetoric so duplicitous as we are now seeing from President Barack Obama.
“We cannot settle for a future of rising deficits and debts that our children cannot pay,” he said last month, and he has talked as well about fiscal discipline, eliminating waste, increased efficiency, more focused policies and how dishonest President Bush was in leaving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “off the books.”
Well, yes, Bush did that thing and he shouldn’t have, but everyone knew that money was being spent and the dishonesty, such as it was, is nothing – zero, zip, nada – next to Obama dressing up as a miser as he promotes a $3.59 trillion budget with a $1.2 trillion deficit on its back.
Look 10 years out, and the doubling of one program here and another there will give us new debt in excess of $9 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But not to worry, says Obama, whose rescue starts with demanding a laughable $100 million in reduced spending from federal agencies, many of which would be put out of business entirely if continued life depended on non-political cost-benefit analyses.
That $100 million, some skeptics quickly noted, amounts to .003 percent of the 2010 budget amount — a teaspoonful in a thunderstorm, — at the same time federal employees are to be increased by tens of thousands. A charade? Here comes another – supposed cuts of $17 billion in federal spending in the budget itself.
But, of course, some of those cuts are actually tax hikes and others, such as reducing farm subsidies, won’t get past Congress. These billions are still a tiny amount next to the total, and meanwhile, this year’s spending has climbed to $3.94 trillion. That includes $13 billion in Obama-approved pork, as well as crushing stimulus handouts that were supposed to be listed online by now. They aren’t.
A truly serious president would not be fiddling around while our future burns. He would be addressing entitlements (mainly, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid), which have tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities and constitute 60 percent of the budget. The day of reckoning on this government-generated mess is not all that far off, and when it comes, the economic crisis of the moment will seem small potatoes.
There are some feasible answers that grow less feasible with every passing year – the closer baby boomers get to retirement, the fewer the options. About all we’ve gotten out of Obama so far is the idea of lifting caps on payroll taxes – a quarter-of-the-way measure for Social Security –and the occasional mention that, at some point or the other, there’s going to have to be a bipartisan solution. Oh yes, there is his fervent desire to add another unaffordable entitlement to the list: Universal health insurance.
His 2010 budget includes a $634 billion down payment on the health plan that should be vastly reduced and even then postponed until these other matters are conclusively dealt with, the recession is over, debate has been waged and robust economic growth has resumed.
Like so many other of his rush-job proposals, this is a potentially catastrophic ambition conditioned more by reflexive ideology than the fiscal discipline this hour calls for.
But then, Obama knows what to do about this fiscal discipline thing – talk sternly about the need for it while zooming down the highway in the opposite direction.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
