Think the president has drafted a realistic budget plan? Don’t talk to Barron’s Washington editor Jim McTague.
President Obama last week presented Congress with his fourth consecutive political-stunt budget. The president’s 2013 fiscal game plan, like virtually all of his utterances, is designed to rally his base, not to put the country’s creaky fiscal house on a firm footing before it collapses in a heap like the House of Clennam in Dickens’ Little Dorrit.
While the president claimed his budget offers a balanced solution to solving the deficit, with $2.50 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases, a close examination reveals that these numbers are an artful exaggeration and that his plan would actually add to the nation’s debt, causing Republicans to pronounce the document a charade. This will mark the fourth consecutive year in which Congress won’t approve an Obama budget. During two of them, Democrats were the majority in both the House and the Senate.
