The President is beginning to remind me of Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, who lives beyond her means until the bailiffs encircle her house with demands for payment.


President Obama has likened the government’s creation of its budget to a family sitting around the proverbial kitchen table making a plan for their spending.  I don’t know about you, but when I sit at my kitchen table and do my budget, I don’t start with the notion of what luxuries I can cut. I start with the idea of how much money is coming in. That’s one big difference between the president and me.


The president starts at the other end of the process, the spending end. He assumes he can always get more money by…raising the taxes of those who sit around the kitchen table. He can also rely on imaginary projections of what the economy is going to do. Somebody will bail him out, right? Stick your household with a big bill, and they’ll find a way to pay it.  The family that makes financial allocations that way is destined for disaster.  So is the U.S. if President Obama’s budget is adopted.


The Wall Street Journal comments:



Hosni Mubarak was more in touch with reality last Thursday night.


Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard calls the budget “pathetic.” National Review says the budget is built on “wishful thinking.” President Obama is apparently a man who can say anything with a straight face.  Here is the truth about his budget:



This $3.73 trillion budget does a Cee Lo Green (“Forget You,” as cleaned up for the Grammys) to the voter mandate in November to control spending. It leaves every hard decision to the new House Republican majority. And it ignores almost entirely the recommendations of Mr. Obama’s own deficit commission. No wonder the commission’s Democratic co-chairman, Erskine Bowles, said Monday that this budget goes “nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare.” And he’s an ally.



How unserious is this budget? Although the White House trumpets $2.18 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade, those savings are so far off in the magical “out years” that you can barely see them from here. More than 95% of the savings would happen after Mr. Obama’s first term in the White House is over, and almost two-thirds of the promised deficit reduction would arrive after 2016. Pretending to cut deficits by pushing all real cuts into the future is Budget Flimflam 101.


Oh, yes–and President Obama’s new budget gives a big boost to the much-beloved IRS. At a time when many Americans want tax reform (the flat tax or the fair tax), the President’s budget includes the hiring of more than 5,000 new IRS agents. Given the taxes that will be rquired to support this fantasy budget, that’s not going to be nearly enough new agents.