Obama’s Budget

That is, its failure:

Let’s start with the bottom line. Obama proposes to spend $3.78 trillion dollars in FY2014, the highest level of spending ever. Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards calculates this against the budget that preceded Obama’s term in office, the FY2008 budget that was the last to get a signature from George W. Bush. Obama’s proposal increases spending by 27 percent over those six years and by 8 percent over the last normal-order budget for FY2010.

This increase comes despite Obama’s promises to introduce budget and deficit discipline, and in defiance of voters who want the federal government to reduce spending. It comes after the initiation of the budget sequester, which was supposed to lop off a mere $85 billion in spending each year for the next decade, which would have been just 2.3 percent of last year’s budget. Instead, this proposal would increase spending by $154 billion, almost twice what sequestration was supposed to save taxpayers.

So much for a multi-year approach to fiscal discipline! Obama’s budget bypasses the very sequester his White House demanded and got in 2011. AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis pointed out that Obama’s own budget office projected that the new budget proposal would lead to a balanced budget by … 2055. That assumes, of course, that whatever savings Obama claims to make in this budget will last 41 years longer than the sequester savings did.

Needless to say, Republicans on Capitol Hill were not impressed.

Well, his gall is impressive.

And then there’s the criticism from the nutjob left:

6 thoughts on “Obama’s Budget”

  1. in defiance of voters who want the federal government to reduce spending

    The voters who preferred Democrats to Republicans last November? The voters who tell pollsters that they favor maintaining or increasing every category of federal spending?

    the highest level of spending ever

    Only if you ignore inflation. Comparing spending in 2013 dollars, we get:

    2009: $3.81T
    2014: $3.78T (decrease of 1% over 5 years)

    For comparison, in 2013 dollars:

    2001: $2.44T
    2005: $2.94T (increase of 20% over 4 years)
    2009: $3.81T (increase of 30% over 4 years)

      1. Give the poor guy a break: Obama makes it awful hard for a good little apparatchik to parrot the Revolutionary Truth with a straight face…

  2. It’s DOA with the 401k limit poison pill. We got a President that believes we should cap American prosperity and happiness. That’s all you need to know about his budget and the mindset of those who support it.

  3. “That’s the message in President Obama’s budget for fiscal 2014, which for the first time proposes to cap the amount Americans can save in these tax-sheltered investment vehicles. The White House explanation is that some people have accumulated “substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.” So Mr. Obama proposes to “limit an individual’s total balance across tax-preferred accounts to an amount sufficient to finance an annuity of not more than $205,000 per year in retirement, or about $3 million for someone retiring in 2013.”

    Ahh ok so NOW the govenment wants to tell you what is enough for retirement.

    That’s that word again:

    “reasonable”

    Just like reasonable, common sense gun grabbing laws.

    It is of absolutely NO consequence how many people this affects.

    It’s the principle that matters.

    I can’t help but wonder if this doesn’t cause at least ONE synapse to fire in the heads of Jim, Gerrib, and the rest of the lib-dem apparatchiks.

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324050304578412932073225110.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read

Comments are closed.