2012 Budget

Not serious on the budget. [Link]

This week may be a teachable moment for the gentry liberals and Obamacons who swooned over Obama in 2008. They thought that someone so smart, so reasonable-sounding, so much like them would be the one to chart a course to fiscal sanity.

They accepted the years of massive deficits during the recession. But by the 2012, he would finally start to put the budget on a path to a sustainable future, right?

Instead, he ignored his own fiscal commission and punting on America’s entitlement crisis. As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank noted, Obama kicked the can again.

Obama’s budget proposal is a remarkably weak and timid document. He proposes to cut only $1.1 trillion from federal deficits over the next decade — a pittance when you consider that the deficit this year alone is in the neighborhood of $1.5 trillion. The president makes no serious attempt at cutting entitlement programs that threaten to drive the government into insolvency.

Andrew Sullivan said Obama’s budget was “deeply unserious.” Slate’s John Dickerson argued that Obamamust be working on a secret plan because the one he released was so lame.

Even if Obama is pursuing closed-door talks, it’s clear he’s unwilling to lead on the most important domestic policy issue of our generation.