During a February hearing before Rep. Paul Ryan’s House Budget committee, U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was confronted with a chart showing the unsustainable fiscal path that awaits the nation if nothing is done to control spending. “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem,” Geithner told Ryan, in one of the more candid moments for an Obama administration official. “What we do know is we don’t like yours.” On Tuesday, President Obama expanded Geithner’s statement into a campaign-style speech.
Speaking at an Associated Press luncheon, Obama unleashed a mouthful of metaphors to attack Ryan’s budget, which was approved last week by House Republicans. According to Obama, the Ryan plan, which attempts to balance the budget over time by reining in government spending, is a “Trojan Horse” and “thinly veiled social Darwinism.” He said that in America, “prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class” and that Ryan’s budget was a “prescription for decline.” And that was just in one paragraph.
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Obama blasted the GOP budget for harming seniors, autistic children and cancer patients. He even said it would mean more canceled airplane flights and less reliable weather forecasts.
Over the course of the blistering speech, Obama offered precious few details about how he would tackle the nation’s debt problem. Instead, he touted reforms proposed by the Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission he appointed, even though he has rejected their plan in two successive budgets. In a further indication of his unseriousness, Obama touted a surtax on millionaires called the “Buffett rule,” after billionaire investor Warren Buffett. The Joint Committee on Taxation recently estimated that a similar proposal by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., would raise just $47 billion over 10 years. That represents about 0.6 percent of the more than $8 trillion in deficits that Obama’s proposed budget would rack up.
If nothing is done to get our debt problem under control, then a baby girl born during Obama’s speech today will see debt as a percentage of GDP rise to 179 percent by the time she graduates from college (2034). This would require tax revenues more than double those of this year. By way of comparison, Greece, which recently defaulted on its debt, had a debt to GDP ratio of 165 percent in 2011.
Obama tried to portray himself as wanting to preserve the American dream for future generations from the budget-axe of the GOP. But his own refusal as president to produce a serious budget poses a much greater threat to the nation’s youth.
