President Obama’s $3.8 trillion budget and its $1.6 trillion deficit is a bundle of tricks, mistakes, evasions and, yes, along with all that, a handful of decent enough ideas, but none of them nearly bold enough to stop a mighty fall.
The crucial need, of course, is to stop runaway spending so that taxes and debt can come down. If they don’t, we are done for. If money needed to start new businesses, expand them and create jobs is sucked up by the government, the economy doesn’t walk.
It crawls. It limps. It finally collapses like someone shot dead.
So what we get from Obama is a budget freeze for a portion of the government that is already vastly overfunded and so tiny a part of the whole as to be barely noticeable on spending pie charts.
We get some proposed cuts that will likely never be enacted by Congress and would be offset even if they were by budget increases many times higher.
We get ideas for future reductions that no political realist believes in for a minute, and we get a proposed deficit-lowering commission that will supposedly help do the job that the White House and Congress are not courageous enough to do, only it won’t.
Oh yes, there are tax breaks for small businesses, and that’s good, except that there are simultaneously new tax “fees” on other businesses. The worry some express is that businesses are scared of taking any chances right now because who knows what new stumbling blocks will come from the leftists currently in charge.
There are also planned tax increases on the best off among us. That is not an answer. The problem is not in paying for the spending. The problem is having all that spending. The tax increases will just keep robbing from all of us to foster more layers of ineffective, liberty-denying, incentive-reducing government.
There are also planned tax increases on the best off among us. That is not an answer. The problem is not in paying for the spending. The problem is having all that spending. The tax increases will just keep robbing from all of us to foster more layers of ineffective, liberty-denying, incentive-reducing government.
The need is for something substantive and real, and what that means is reforming the entitlement programs that take up almost 60 percent of the budget, starting with the big ones, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Do nothing about them, and you have done nothing, period. You have maybe danced a cute dance, but you have done nothing. In fact, if you are the Obama administration, you have done worse than nothing.
The graceless, evade-responsibility fact is that this administration would rather blame President George W. Bush for everything wrong than do anything right itself. Bush deserves criticism, but look at Obama’s failed stimulus package that cost as much as the Iraq war. It’s hard to contend this administration has not been negligent to the point of grotesqueness.
This is also an administration that aimed to give us a new health care entitlement on top of all the entitlements that will soon be crushing us with their unfunded liabilities in the trillions, and that has paid scant attention to helping end a recession without giving us something worse.
In the end, this budget proposal is more of the same — spend more and more with nothing to reverse course. As Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution is quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the proposals give us “unsustainable deficits as far as the eye can see.” A president who dismisses his critics as always partisan or ideological ought to know that this is an objective, expert analyst talking.
It won’t do to dismiss all criticism as somehow coming from hacks, and it won’t do to keep treating the nation to bluff and guff.
