If the president really supports a balanced approach toward addressing the huge gulf between federal revenue and federal spending, it’s clear that his notion of “balance” does not include any change on the spending side. Samuel Staley offers detail in a column for Real Clear Markets.
The White House’s image as the pragmatic, even-handed steward in the debt debate is little more than a clever rhetorical sleight-of-hand that is as disingenuous as it is illusory. Obama made raising taxes on the rich (the top 2%) a signature campaign item, but no one with knowledge of the federal budget expects the revenues generated to cover near-trillion dollar deficits. In fact, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects deficits to accumulate by more than $1.7 billion over the next four years under the current fiscal cliff deal while the annual deficit is expected to rise from $568 billion in 2015 to $818 billion by 2022.
With its Democratic allies in Congress, the White House has repeatedly argued that the solution to the budget deficit — and by implication the nation’s ballooning debt — must include a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. Despite the political compromise during the fiscal cliff debate that raised taxes, the White House has bristled at anything that limits its ability to raise taxes further and, in effect, sustain a federal government that now gobbles up 24 percent of the national economy. If anything, the administration has done just the opposite: propping up and encouraging state and local government spending through stimulus programs and signing new entitlements into law. Moreover, President Obama’s inauguration speech seems calculated to the hold the line on current spending levels and perhaps even foreshadow an even larger federal government on the domestic front.
