When he unveiled his budget proposal, President Obama should have worn a red rubber clown nose. It is not a serious proposal. He knows this. Congress knows this. The American public knows it. The proposal the White House produced Monday is a campaign brochure couched in budget language.
The president's chief of staff and former budget director, Jacob Lew, dutifully recited the week's talking point: "the time for austerity is not today." Perhaps not. But then nobody in Washington has proposed austerity measures — not even Rep. Paul Ryan, whose ostensibly austere budget proposal would increase annual spending by 2.9 percent.
Last summer, the president was proposing to increase spending by 4.7 percent a year. His new budget plan actually accelerates that rate of increase, to 5 percent a year. Despite $1.9 trillion in new taxes over 10 years, the budget would generate $6.7 trillion in new debt.
The president's budget does nothing to address the crisis of runaway entitlement spending. It rehashes tired old tax hikes even a Democratic Congress could not stomach. And it jacks the national debt up into the mesosphere: By the end of a second Obama term, the red ink would reach nearly $16 trillion, more than double the amount he inherited.
Little details can be revealing, and the details of the White House budget proposal show a set of priorities badly out of whack. The plan would increase subsidies for the purchase of the Chevy Volt, an electric car that costs $41,000 and whose buyers have an average income of $175,000. It would increase funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. But it would slash spending for the federal government's primary responsibility — national defense — and cancel all funding for the District of Columbia's Opportunity Scholarship program. Environmental preening wins, poor inner-city kids lose.
Here's another detail the White House probably will not dwell upon: The president is proposing an increase of more than $1 billion for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. More than $860 million of that sum is supposed to be used to build the federal insurance exchange that will backstop any state not creating its own exchange. Politico Pro reports that "This funding is necessary in part because the amount originally appropriated for the federal costs of implementing the Affordable Care Act — $1 billion — is expected to be gone by the end of this year."
Takeaways? First, creating an exchange is hugely expensive, and Virginia was wise to defer action. Second, and even more important: Obamacare already is exceeding cost estimates. It will drive the health care cost curve up, not down.
News coverage generally described deficit reduction as "delayed" under the latest White House proposal. In Washington, "delayed" is the equivalent of "fictional." This is especially true in budgetary matters, because today's spending hike becomes tomorrow's "baseline," which makes future spending restraint all the more difficult. Obama knows this, and appears to be consciously pursuing a policy of "stuff the beast" — loading up spending today in order to increase the necessity for tax hikes tomorrow.
In the meantime, he is piling up debt at historically unprecedented levels, making his budget not only a tax-and-spend blueprint but a tax-borrow-and-spend one. It's almost a parody of left-wing dogma. But the joke, alas, is on the public.
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