Obama's Pathetic Budget

[Geee]

Weekly Standard:

Let’s be candid about President Obama’s budget. It’s pathetic. The country faces a worsening debt crisis and Obama has not come to play. He kissed off the crisis in his State of the Union address last month. And now his plan for spending over the next 10 years doesn’t come close to dealing with the debt problem.


So he 0-for-2 in coming to grips with the fiscal mess that threatens America’s economic position at home and abroad. Obama didn’t create the crisis, but in two years his spending has added $3 trillion to the national debt. In 2011, the deficit figures to be nearly 10 percent of the gross domestic product. In 2012, the deficit will exceed $1 trillion for the third consecutive year.

Obama would cut spending by $1.1 trillion over the coming decade. That figure is smaller than the projected deficit of $1.5 trillion in 2011. Think about that: Obama’s total reductions are less than a single year’s deficit. That’s what I mean by pathetic.

A highly publicized item in the 2012 budget is a 5-year (partial) freeze on discretionary spending, a saving of $400 billion. That was swallowed up this year when Congressional Budget Office re-calculated the deficit for 2011 deficit and boosted it from $1.1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, the biggest 1-year deficit ever.

Obama’s plan includes spending hikes in some areas. The most egregious may be $53 billion for construction of high-speed rail in Florida, California and several other states. This is one of the least cost-effective projects in the history of wasteful government spending. Yet it’s one of the president’s pet projects, and he appears more wedded to it than to taming the rise in the national debt.