Cue the chorus of Sweet Charity’s “Hey Big Spender.”
On the heels of the promised spending freeze:
President Barack Obama will propose on Monday a $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011 that projects the deficit will shoot up to a record $1.6 trillion this year, but would push the red ink down to about $700 billion, or 4% of the gross domestic product, by 2013, according to congressional aides. —WSJ
President Obama sent Congress on Monday a proposed budget of $3.8 trillion for the fiscal year 2011, saying that his plan would produce a decade-long reduction in the deficit from $1.6 trillion this year, a shortfall swollen by $100 billion in additional tax cuts and public works spending that he is seeking right away.
[…]
“We won’t be able to bring down this deficit overnight,” Mr. Obama told reporters, saying that his budget includes investments in education and other areas that are critical to the country’s future. “We will continue to do what it takes to create jobs.” —NYT
It would take a promise of no new taxes, a promise to stop creating regulations by which to manipulate the private sector when not subsidizing it by force. It’s ironic: a government that demonstrates time and time again that it has more faith in its own excesses than it its citizenry or the driving force of the free and unhindered market expects that same bloc to manifest jobs under burdensome weight of big government. It’s like the administration is setting up the free market to fail.
More immediately, the grim numbers are a chickens-come-home-to-roost moment for both the White House and Democratic Congress, which skipped past any real deficit debate last year in their eagerness to get onto healthcare reform.
The goal then was to act quickly — before the deficits hit home — and institute major changes which proponents argue will serve the long-term fiscal health of the country. Instead, a year of wrangling and refusal to consider more incremental steps have brought Obama and Democrats to this juncture, where the waves of red ink threaten to overwhelm their boat.
The deficit picture now is much worse than a year ago, with 2010 threatening to top $1.55 trillion. Revenues continue to lag, and Obama has had to commit much more than he had hoped for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. — Politico
But administration officials argued that Obama inherited a deficit that was already topping $1 trillion when he took office and given the severity of the downturn, the president had to spend billions of dollars stabilizing the financial system and jump-starting growth. — AP
Instapundit has a great reaction to the above:
You see this kind of thing pop up in comments a lot, and sometimes even out of the mouth of the less-honest variety of pundit. Which means, of course, that once again it’s time to roll out this graphic:
Notice anything? Like maybe how Bush’s deficits are dwarfed by Obama’s? And maybe how the deficit was falling throughout Bush’s second term? Until the very end, when TARP — hardly popular with the Tea Party crowd — rolled out. The “Bush was as big a spender as Obama” line is just a flat-out lie, which the apologists for the powers that be hope you’ll buy because . . . well, because a lie is pretty much all they’ve got at this point.
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