WASHINGTON — Five days before his inauguration, Barack Obama told The Washington Post that entitlement reform could no longer be kicked down the road. He then spent the next two years kicking — racking up $3 trillion in new debt along the way — on the grounds that massive temporary deficit spending was necessary to prevent another Great Depression.
To prove his bona fides, he later appointed a deficit reduction commission. It made its report in December, when the economy was well past recession, solemnly declaring that “the era of debt denial is over.”
That lasted all of two months. The president’s first post-commission budget, submitted Monday, marks a return to obliviousness.
The budget touts a deficit reduction of $1.1 trillion over the next decade. Even if you buy this number, Obama’s budget adds $7.2 trillion in new debt over that same decade.
But there’s a catch. The administration assumes economic growth levels higher than private economists and the Congressional Budget Office predict. Without this rosy scenario — using CBO growth estimates — $1.7 trillion of revenue disappears and U.S. debt increases $9 trillion over the next decade.
Classic Obama debt reduction: Add $2 trillion in new taxes, then add another $1 trillion in new spending and, presto, you’ve got $1 trillion of debt reduction.
And what of those “painful cuts” Obama is making to programs he really cares about? The catch is that these “cuts” are from a hugely inflated new baseline created by the orgy of spending in Obama’s first two years. These were supposedly catastrophe-averting emergency measures. But post-recession, they remain in place. As a result, discretionary nondefense budget levels today are 24 percent higher than before Obama — 84 percent higher if you add in the stimulus money.
Yet this is penny-ante stuff. The real money is in entitlements. And the scandal of this budget is Obama doesn’t touch them. Not Social Security. Not Medicaid. Not Medicare.
A more cynical budget is hard to imagine. This one ignores the looming debt crisis, shifts all responsibility for serious budget-cutting to the Republicans and sets Obama up perfectly for re-election in 2012.
Obama fancies his optimism to be Reaganesque. It’s more Louis XV. Reagan begat a quarter-century of prosperity; Louis, the deluge.
Moreover, unlike Obama, Louis had the decency to admit he was forfeiting the future. He never pretended to be winning it.
Charles Krauthammer: letters@charleskrauthammer.com
