A Cowardly Proposal

President Obama submitted his budget proposal on Monday.  This budget lays out the president's priorities and represents his vision for America.  As a sidenote, it shows that Obama is a coward and a colossal liar.

In 2009, the president made it clear that spending on a large stimulus was needed to end the recession and begin a recovery.  In 2010, his top priority was passing health care reform, which he argued was key to lowering costs.  In 2011, he came to realize that our booming deficits were an issue and pushed for a balanced program of tax increases and spending cuts.

But today, we can honestly say that President Obama is quite simply full of it.  In 2012, he proposes raising taxes well beyond anything ever discussed in the last 30 years and the final result is a larger deficit that last year.  Despite his words to the contrary, this budget makes it clear that raising taxes is not about fairness or lowering the deficit, it is only about spending more money; and spending it on his special interests, not America's interests.

This budget raises the tax deduction for buying an electric vehicle from $7,500 to $10,000.  This deduction has little effect on sales and the average income of those who purchase these $40,000+ cars is $177,000.  At the same time, the President would kill a Washington DC scholarship program for poor children that, by all marks, is succeeding. 

So the president who once said that he only cared about what works, has decided that putting more money into a failed effort for the rich is more important than a successful program for poor children.

When Obama took office he said that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.  Instead he doubled it.  If passed this budget would raise revenue from 15.4% of GDP to 20.1%, far above the post-WWII average of 18% and yet he spends even more, raising the projected deficit to $1.39 trillion.

The president has said that we need to temporarily spend more to fight this current crisis, yet his budget lays out a ten year plan that never spends less than 22% of GDP and is nearly 23% in 2022.  Given that spending was as low as 18% under Clinton, there is no way to call such a spending spree temporary.

The tax increases he proposes are unrealistic.  Dividend income would rise from it's current 15% to 39.6%.  The president has spent much time talking about the so-called Buffett rule that would tax the wealthy at a 30% minimum, but that is found nowhere here.  Why?  Because for Obama, 30% wasn't really enough.  With certain phaseouts on deductions, the actual tax rate for the wealthy will now be nearly 45%.  Is there a better way to kill economic activity than this?

Remember when Bill Clinton talked about the peace dividend from the end of the Cold War?  That peace dividend under Speaker Gringich went a long way toward balancing our budget.  President Obama's budget would make deep cuts in our defense budget, but this peace dividend would be transferred into more green boondoggles and high-speed rail projects. 

So what we have is a budget that would raise taxes beyond the thinkable, cut defense and still lose more money than before.  President Obama's budget claims to cut spending and lower the deficit but it doesn't.  He claims that this is a vision for an America built to last, but it isn't.  President Obama has talked a big game about being responsible and remaining true to our American values, but this budget makes that a lie; and the president is a coward for not having the temerity to level with the American people and tell them the truth.