President Obama’s latest news conference was further confirmation that his voracious appetite for spending was not satisfied but whetted by the fiscal cliff deal, which he views as an appetizer.

We were told that the GOP achieved a coup in the fiscal cliff negotiations because they lured Obama into an agreement to lock in the Bush tax rates except for the highest-income earners. Never mind that Obama agreed to no spending cuts or entitlement reform after demanding a “balanced approach” to deficit reduction; they told us he’d be forced to address those matters in a couple of months in the debt ceiling negotiations. They argued that by agreeing to make the Bush rates “permanent,” Obama had tacitly admitted that he couldn’t sustain the welfare state through tax increases on the middle class and that he’d now have to — grudgingly or not — turn his attention to spending cuts and entitlement reform.