Hearing John Boehner declare that the President's budget is dead on arrival in Congress isn't surprising. He's the leader of the opposition party, after all. But hearing Obama agree? That's surprising.
If Obama's statement to not take his budget "too seriously" didn't indicate how preposterous it is, nothing will. Besides being built upon phony expectations and fuzzy math, the budget isn't worth the paper it's presented on:
Starting with the bottom line, according to the administration's own numbers, the 2012 budget would push debt (held by the public, not government trust funds) up to nearly $12 trillion at the end of 2012. That's up from $5.8 trillion at the end of 2008. So the federal government will have borrowed as much during President Obama's four-year term in office as it had during the previous two-century-plus history since the Republic was founded in 1789.
And that's before the entitlement-spending explosion associated with the Baby Boom retirement hits with full force. Over the coming decade, spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare's new entitlements will soar, from $1.6 trillion in 2011 to $3.0 trillion in 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
With the costs of entitlements rising rapidly, what does the Obama budget plan to do to head off a crisis? Nothing. As a result, by their own numbers, the budget would run deficits of $7.2 trillion over the next ten years, pushing the nation's accumulated debt to an astounding $19 trillion in 2021, or nearly 80 percent of GDP.
James Capretta goes on in this piece to acknowledge that those consequences are the best-case scenario. And anyone who is sane recognizes that with government, the best-case scenario never emerges. It's Capretta's belief that Obama is merely proposing an un-serious budget to simply cause a delay that will result in what he really wants: an emergency tax hike to stave off a financial meltdown. It's a backdoor policy that the Republicans better be aware of and willing to avoid.
The Republicans best course of action is to lay waste to this budget and craft their own. Why is it that with this president, the best idea continues to be ignoring his ideas and proposals and start over?
