“I‘m honored to be in this job, and honored to serve this president, and honored to present this budget,” acting White House budget director Jeffrey Zients told the House Budget Committee in a hearing Wednesday. We’re glad Zients is honored to be where he is, but after listening to the implausible defenses he offered for President Obama’s proposed 2013 federal budget, we certainly don’t envy his position.
Obama’s budgeteers have claimed that their new document achieves $4 trillion in deficit reduction. Budget panel Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., however, pointed out to Zients during his testimony that more than $2 trillion of that purported “savings” results from Obama claiming credit for a debt-ceiling deal that Congress enacted over the president’s objections last year. Zients replied disingenuously: “We started the race months ago. So taking credit in this budget for the $2 trillion that we’ve worked together to achieve, I think, makes a lot of sense.”
Ryan then pointed out that an additional $850 billion in “savings” from the budget results only from pretending that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would have otherwise gone on for another 10 years. When Zients groused that the Bush administration had waged those wars without putting them in the budget, Ryan smacked him down: “If these wars are unpaid for, how can you claim savings from them?”
But Zients’ worst performance came the day before yesterday. His predecessor at the Office of Management and Budget, White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew, had given audiences of two different Sunday talk shows an unabashedly dishonest explanation of why Senate Democrats have failed to pass a budget for nearly three calendar years. “You can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes,” he told CNN’s Candy Crowley, “and you can’t get 60 votes without bipartisan support.”
That is false. And coming as it does from an experienced and knowledgeable budget man like Lew, who headed the OMB under both Presidents Clinton and Obama, it is a premeditated, pants-on-fire lie. Budget resolutions require only a simple majority (at most 51 votes) to pass the Senate, and cannot be delayed or blocked by Republican filibusters. But it fell to Zients to defend this lie before the Senate Budget Committee on Tuesday. He did not cover himself with glory when he equated an actual budget resolution with a totally separate matter — the debt-ceiling deal that Congress passed last year, known as the Budget Control Act. “It takes 60 votes to pass a budget, um, like the BCA,” Zients began. “No, no,” replied Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa. “That’s not a budget. You know that.” Zients had no choice but to abandon his feeble talking point and admit that Toomey was correct.
Obama’s budget adds to the national debt in each of the next 10 years. It does nothing to reform the entitlements, which, along with debt service, already consume over 90 percent of the federal government’s annual tax revenues. Like Zients, the Obama White House knows better than to tout the budget it proposed Monday as a gusher of new savings for taxpayers.
