The Obama Budget

Yesterday, President Obama presented his fiscal year 2011 budget to Congress.  Since then, every news organization and every pundit on every side have tried to parse the text to determine what it all means.  For certain, when The New York Times, which never wastes an opportunity to serve as cheerleader for Team Obama, calls the President's spending and debt levels unsustainable, they certainly must be so.

Shall we consider the numbers?  Here are a few to ponder:

• A deficit in the Federal budget of $1,270,000,000,000 (that is $1.27 Trillion) for the coming year, which is on top of the deficit of $1.56 Trillion during President Obama's first year in office.
• According to the President's own projections, after a short period of leveling off from 2014 to 2018, the Federal budget deficit will begin another cycle of dramatic increases beginning in 2019.
• The President's projected budget deficits over the next ten years cumulatively total $8.53 Trillion (and remember, these are just the deficits, not the total national debt).
• Total Federal revenues for FY 2011 will exceed $2.57 Trillion, an increase of 18.6% over Federal revenues for the preceding year.

In the President's remarks, linked above, he blames George W. Bush for the budget problems, continuing a trend that is growing old.  For example, he placed part of the blame for the current budget deficit on the passage of Medicare Part D (the drug benefit) during the Bush Administration.  However, he conveniently leaves out the fact that Part D was strongly supported by BOTH parties in Congress and that the version favored by the Democrats was actually much more costly than the version that was ultimately adopted.  And if Part D entitlement is to blame for a large part of the Federal budget shortfall, then why doesn't President Obama simply urge the repeal of the benefit?  The current budget belongs to President Obama, not President Bush, and he needs to take the blame for his own runaway spending rather than blaming it on the previous Administration.  And just so you know, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a supporter of the free-spending of President Bush and Congressional Republicans when they controlled the budget.  The same rules apply to all, and there is plenty of blame to go around.

We should not lose sight, either, that all of the numbers being pushed around by the Administration and others regarding the budget fail to consider the consequences of Federal unfunded budget liabilities, which add Trillions and Trillions more to the national debt.  According to David Walker, former Comptroller General of the United States, the current national debt figure of $12.3 Trillion that is quoted by politicians and news sources should actually be $45 to $50 Trillion more to account for unfunded liabilities from Medicare, Social Security and other Federal programs.  And you can also add to the bottom line the $6 Trillion or so that taxpayers are on the hook for as a result of the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac takeovers.

Our government cannot continue to bury us under mountains of debt.  If the current trend continues, we will become a client state of China, to whom we owe all of that money.  (Do you think the Chinese know this fact?  I'm betting they do.)  Someone must step up and speak the truth:  entitlement spending must be brought under control.  We must stop borrowing our way out of economic hard times.  Creation of a massive new entitlement program in the form of Obamacare cannot be justified in the face of our current budget crisis.