Now that we’ve seen the President’s budget for 2012, don’t be misled by its eye-popping numbers. It proposes spending at $3.73 trillion. It would run $1.65 trillion in red ink next year. And it would add just over $7 trillion to the debt over the next ten years.
By 2021 the President’s budget would increase our interest payments on the debt from $205 billion a year to a staggering $928 billion. This budget does not address in an honest and forthright manner the deficit and debt crisis the nation faces.
And that’s a reality that can’t be cleverly denied or disguised. The President appointed his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to chart a course out of the crisis we face. Last July its co-chairs, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, said that current budgetary trends are, “a cancer that will destroy the country from within.” Their report, issued last December, describes the Moment of Truth we face. The report concludes that, “America cannot be great if we go broke.”
And by that they mean that we must reform the four components of the budget that account for the runaway spending—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Pentagon.
And there’s the rub. The President’s Budget ignores that challenge. Obviously, the Administration’s political calculation assumes that the leadership on reforming entitlement spending and Defense spending must come from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. But the hard fact of the matter is that it can only come from the President himself, and the President knows that, even though his “handlers” don’t.
Judd Gregg, a member of the Commission and a former Republican Senator from New Hampshire, has it right. He described the President as walking away from the Report’s main findings. He called on the President to either embrace the report or reject it. He criticized the House Republicans for focusing on trying to solve this problem by just cutting discretionary spending. And he called on the President to “call the bluff” of the House GOP.
Bowles, a Democrat and Co-Chair of the Commission, commented on the President’s budget by saying, “it goes nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare.”
So we’re going nowhere fast. And by the end of this year, it will be too late because the onrushing 2012 presidential campaign will have crushed any possibility of bipartisan compromise. And bipartisan compromise is the only way to get this job done.
The President needs some advice from outside his myopic “Bubble”. So here’s the deal, Mr. President. We’re both diehard White Sox fans. The Sox open the home season on April 7th against the Rays. I’ll meet you at U.S. Cellular Field. You buy the tickets and throw out the first ball. I’ll buy the redhots and the beer. More importantly, I’ll bet we can find a way to thread the eye of this needle before time runs out.
LeRoy Goldman
February 15, 2011.
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