Everybody is baffled by President Obama’s budget proposal. Even, it seems, President Obama. He said on Tuesday that it was full of “tough choices,” even as he was acknowledging that he’d refused to make any choices when it came to the key aspect of the federal budget: the unsustainable growth of health-care entitlements.
“My goal here is to actually solve the problem,” he said. But his new “tough choices” budget doesn’t even suggest a path to solving it.
The president wants us to believe that the way he is going to fix the most pressing problem facing the nation is — presto — to do nothing about it!
If this sounds like chutzpah, give Obama a little credit for self-knowledge: He all but admitted it. When it comes to entitlements, he told Chuck Todd of NBC. “This is a matter of everybody having a serious conversation about where we want to go, and then ultimately getting in that boat at the same time so it doesn’t tip over.”
By his own description, Barack Obama is just one of the passengers on a political rowboat on which he and his fellow passengers, the Republicans, are going to have to balance each other out very carefully.
The ship of state is heading into treacherous waters, and the president of the United States does not wish to serve as its captain.
Hard to blame him. Dealing with the entitlement crisis appears at first glance to be as thankless a responsibility as has ever been put before the political class. It requires a sense of governance that goes against every Obaman idea and impulse.
It’s not about a grand new health-care system, or new fast choo-choos, or nationwide 4G access. This is governance that requires constriction, contraction, the establishment of limits.
He knows this is where the budget must go. He said so.
Thus, the budget as drafted suggests that the post-midterm Obama has decided upon a surprisingly cynical path — one in which he will attempt to claim with a straight face that he has put the nation on a path to deficit and debt reduction in the future, even as he does nothing to address them in the present.
As Yuval Levin writes on National Review Online, “By the administration’s own calculations, the effect its own budget would have in 2012 would be to increase the deficit by $11 billion. In other words, the Obama administration says that if we pass the Obama budget, then the deficit for 2012 will be $1.1 trillion, but if we don’t pass it then the deficit would be $1.09 trillion.”
What of the $2.2 trillion the administration plans to save over the next 10 years? Turns out they’re not there. “It claims $315 billion saved from eliminating ‘certain tax expenditures’ — but doesn’t list which ones,” writes Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation. “It takes credit for $321 billion in spending cuts to offset the Medicare ‘doc fix’ from 2014 through 2021. What are the cuts? To be determined.”
All in all, Riedl writes, “$2 trillion of the $2.2 trillion in claimed savings are pure gimmicks and magic asterisks, rather than specific, legitimate, measurable policy proposals.”
What’s he up to? John Dickerson, an honest liberal reporter, wrote in Slate that “Obama’s spending plan is so timid, he must be working on a smarter plan we don’t know about.”
I think he does have a plan. We’ll only know if it was smart on Election Day 2012.
My guess: Obama is staking his political future on a hope — the hope that the economy will strengthen by degrees as 2012 approaches, and that the sour public mood will lighten as it did for Ronald Reagan in 1984.
He wants to ride another wave of good feeling to reelection.
He doesn’t want to be the killjoy who says it’s time we ate our spinach (he has literally assigned that job to Michelle). And he may believe the present thirst for blaming the nation’s woes on the problem of growing government will be satisfied instead by a growing economy.
In other words, this isn’t a budget. It’s a stall.
johnpodhoretz@gmail.com