Obama Parts Company With Reality

Today the Obama administration unveiled its budget for FY 2011. The budget ostensibly covers the next ten years, but its projections for future years are meaningless. The only year for which it has any significance is 2011, in which it anticipates $3.8 trillion in spending and an astonishing $1.6 trillion deficit. In 2006, the last year in which the Republicans controlled Congress, the deficit was $248 billion–one-seventh what Obama proposes for next year.
In his budget announcement today, Obama said: “[O]ur government is deeply in debt after what can only be described as a decade of profligacy.” So he proposes to put the country far more deeply in debt through profligacy of a sort that was undreamed of just a few years ago.
Obama said: “[W]e can’t simply move beyond this crisis; we have to address the irresponsibility that led to it, and that includes the failure to rein in spending….” But his budget doesn’t rein in spending, it increases it over last year’s precedent-shattering total by around $100 billion.
Obama said: “[I]t would be a terrible mistake to borrow against our children’s future to pay our way today….” His budget, in just the next year, will borrow $1.6 trillion against our children’s future to pay our way today.
Either Obama has completely lost touch with reality, or he thinks we have.
UPDATE: One more thing. The Wall Street Journal estimates that Obama’s proposed repeal of many of the Bush tax cuts will cost Americans who earn more than $200,000 per year $1 trillion over the next decade, assuming that Obama’s tax increases are not reversed. Obama won in 2008 with what Michael Barone called a “top and bottom coalition.” He carried lower-income voters and those with incomes over $250,000, while middle-income voters went for McCain. Now, Obama can kiss the top part of that coalition goodbye.

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