President’s budget sets new spending records

The $3.7 trillion 2012 budget he delivered to Congress Monday purportedly will trim deficits by $1.1 trillion over the next decade, but meanwhile the $14 trillion national debt is expected to grow by $2.7 trillion in the coming years and $13 trillion in a decade.

The plan calls for some modest spending cuts, a five-year freeze on domestic programs, tax increases on energy companies and limiting tax deductions for high-income taxpayers. But the president also calls for spending $53 billion over six years for high-speed rail projects, $10 billion over 10 years to expand broadband Internet access and wireless networks, a continuation of the $7,500 rebate for electric cars, $36 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power plants while closing the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository and increasing Education Department spending 21 percent for the coming year.

“These investments are an essential part of the budget my administration is sending to Congress,” the president said in a speech in Baltimore. “Because I’m convinced that if we out-build and out-innovate and out-educate, as well as out-hustle the rest of the world, the jobs and industries of our time will take root here in the United States. Our people will prosper and our country will succeed.”

About all his budget accomplishes is out-spending every president in the history of the nation and taking the national debt to levels unheard of since the end of World War II.

The budget proposal ignores the president’s own deficit commission, which called for saving $4 trillion over a decade, four times what Mr. Obama proposes. The deficit panel called for raising the Social Security retirement age, doubling the federal tax on gasoline, cutting tax breaks such as mortgage interest deductions and reforming Medicare. Though those recommendations were derided as too timid, Mr. Obama included not one of those proposals in his budget.

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said of the budget plan, “Look, he raises spending everywhere. He raises taxes everywhere, increases borrowing. The trajectory of this budget is in the wrong direction. It would be better if we did nothing than actually pass this budget.”

The budget also is built on multiple assumptions few believe have any chance of occurring. The budget assumes economic growth far more optimistic than most economists project. It also assumes the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will plummet to $50 billion a year and that Congress will stop voting for the “doc fix” every year and actually cut the reimbursement doctors get for Medicare patients.

While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid praised it as a “long-term plan to responsibly cut the deficit in half in his first term while investing in things that grow the economy,” Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., a member of the Senate Budget Committee, said the president missed an opportunity to “tackle wasteful government spending.”

“The president’s budget once again forces our economic future into more uncertainty with $8.7 trillion in new spending, $1.6 trillion in new taxes, and another $13 trillion added to our already American-dream-breaking national debt,” Sen. Ensign said. “The message from the leader of our country is that jobs can wait but record spending levels cannot.”

You can’t add jobs by subtracting more taxes from employers.