President Obama laid out his budget for the 2013 fiscal year on February 13th, and it is fair to say that he shouldn’t expect getting many Valentines from many of the Americans that employ a large percentage of U.S. workers.
In his budget, the President set out plans to enact the “Buffett Rule” which plans to ensure that Americans making over a million dollars a year will pay a minimum effective tax rate of at least 30 percent. The budget is nothing more than a campaign document; the President is planning to pit himself against Mitt Romney, who increasingly looks like the Republican nomination-to-be. But if looked with a close eye, it is clear that this President’s fiscal record is historically poor.
Within his $3.8 trillion budget, President Obama proposed generating $1.7 trillion in new revenue over the next 10 years largely by ending Bush tax cuts for families making more than $250,000, restoring the estate tax to its 2009 level, 45 percent, and limiting subsidies for oil and gas companies. The President has set the scene for a campaign year piece of political class warfare that he hopes to ride to victory in November. But let’s look at the facts and figures that aren’t outlined by the White House.
Why do people complain about government spending? Could it be that this administration has raised spending to historically high levels? The federal government has spent more than 24 percent of GDP for the past four years. That is the highest since World War II. On top of that, the President predicts spending will grow even higher, to around 24.3 percent of GDP.
The European debt crisis has been built on fiscal planning of a similar nature. According to the Wall Street Journal, this budget will also run a deficit of $1.327 trillion in 2012, if that is true, the United States will have had a deficit of at least $1.29 trillion four years in a row for the first time ever. This accounts to a $5 trillion debt during this Presidential term, an astounding figure.
However, the only debt that must be paid back, national debt held by the public, is a much more tangible indication of our nation’s debt. That will reach 74.2 percent this year and rise to 77.4 percent next year.
But our President claims that this bleak picture will change if he is given another mandate by the voting public come next November. He believes that the sudden 17.8 percent rise in revenues, which is a fancy method of saying additional taxes in a way that won’t upset most voters, won’t hurt growth. Giving money to our government hasn’t proven to make much sense. It simply takes money away from potential private employers and consumers so that the national government can do things like pay contractors in Afghanistan billions of dollars to build half-completed gravel roads.
This administration can’t face the facts. We will hear the same sort of excuses for this horrible fiscal record. We’ll hear about how Bush gave this to us and how we should blame Republicans etc. If that were true, then how was it that federal outlays were never above 20 percent of GDP under President Bush and national debt held by the public was never above 39 percent? The facts are that President Obama believes that he can fool voters into reelection as long as he blames former President Bush, Republicans, and the wealthy.
It should have been painfully obvious that the President didn’t care about fiscal responsibility when he decided to push through with Obamacare during one of the worst recessions this country has ever seen.
His supporters will point to some of his accomplishments as we get closer to November, most importantly his end to the war in Iraq. They’ll claim that ending the war will save the fiscal well-being of this nation. These people will fail to realize that the amount of money this nation spends on defense pales in comparison to what we spend on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Perhaps the President should focus on reforming a dying system of elderly pension instead of cutting our nuclear arsenal by 80 percent.