The Budget Is Not Mission Accomplished

The President is now even defending his gigantic spending plan to his own party.  As the story in the Wall Street Journal leads:

Confronting misgivings in his own party, President Barack Obama mounted a stout defense of his blueprint to overhaul the national economy Thursday, arguing that delay on health care, energy and education would make "recovery more fragile and our future less secure."  The president's wide-ranging proposals in the midst of economic crisis faced skepticism from both Democrats and Republicans, as senators questioned his long-term budget outlook and the deficits it envisions in the middle of the next decade.

Calling this a "spending plan" instead of a budget is appropriate.   A budget implies some kind of check and balance between spending and revenue.   There are few checks here, as spending and public debts will soar.   And while the revenue side is expected to increase from the higher tax on small businesses and entrepreneurs, the spending jump dwarfs the extra tax-fueled intake.   American families do not need to run big government to understand the concept of a budget.   If a family earns $4,000 per month, it cannot spend more than $4,000 per month or risk going into debt.   The simple goal is to manage costs and income.   If the same family suddenly decides to spend $10,000 per month because they will "make it back later," that is not a budget.   That is a gamble.

Senator Judd Gregg, who himself nearly took a job on Obama's team, criticized the budget and the income and carbon tax increases in it:

“A $1.4 trillion tax hike is not the solution to our economic woes, especially at a time when American families and businesses can least afford to give more of their earnings to the government. This will hit seniors already grappling with the realities of shrinking savings, and small businesses struggling to stay afloat. These businesses are the economic engine of growth and the source of job creation. And the energy tax, which will hit all consumers regardless of income, is being used as a budgetary piggybank to fund more spending.

The defense of this irresponsible spending plan can already be heard: "we are just dealing with the mistakes of the previous administration."   It's time to move past this now-tired defense, which we hear in some fashion nearly daily.   Yes, the federal deficit surged under the Bush administration.    Yes, government grew.   Even removing a large part of the reason - 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - few can make a case that the Bush team practiced fiscal restraint.   Yet even agreeing to these points, it doesn't justify making past problems worse and doubling bad decisions.

If the President is so incensed about the mistakes of the past, why is he adding to them?    The deficit will jump to $1.75 trillion dollars this fiscal year.    The President also claims he will "cut the deficit in half" in the next few years.   Simple math though tells us that if you double something this year, cutting the new total in half just brings us back to where we were to begin with.  [Be sure to visit the Wall Street Journal's excellent graphical presentation of the spending plans]

Your parents may have told you not to follow bad decisions.   Mine often said, "if your friends jumped off a cliff, would you?"  With this budget we are all going over the edge, and President Obama seems to think jumping off the fiscal cliff is okay because he can blame everything on Bush.   That may have worked in the campaign, but now even some in his own party realize the trillion dollar mistake this spending plan really is, economically and politically.   No doubt some Democrats are already thinking that this budget may become their "mission accomplished" sign symbol of economic bad decisions.