During his State of the Union address, Barack Obama promised to
freeze government spending, not this year, but soon, and not on defense, Medicare, or Social Security. In Washington, this is what is known as a joke.
The punch line: Yesterday’s $3.8 trillion budget proposal, which features the
biggest deficit in history.
Yes, Obama warned us that he wouldn’t rein in the spending right away, but the two headlines so close together sure do make the president look a little silly, don’t they? Obama’s deficit conversion is about as convincing as an IOU for a deathbed confession. “Lord, make me fiscally responsible. But not yet.”
Pop quiz: What are the three main contributors to our ever-growing national debt? Yep. You guessed it. Medicare, Social Security and defense spending. Pledging to freeze spending on everything except those three things is like promising to stop at every stop sign that doesn’t have a white border.
Politically, Obama’s absolutely impotent in the face of this three-headed monster. He tried hacking away at Medicare with health care reform, and Republicans gleefully attacked him for, well, trying to cut Medicare spending. And after escalating the war in Afghanistan, taking on defense spending seems like the political equivalent of attacking Russia in the winter.
So his recent deficit scolding—which he continued yesterday, even as he released a budget fit to tangle with Godzilla—is mostly grandstanding. The national debt scares and enrages the public, and I suppose Obama thinks he has to at least pretend to give a damn, even if it’s taking a backseat for the indefinite future.
In reality, Obama knows that his political future is tied most strongly to the economy, and, because he passed high school economics, he knows he’s going to have to deficit spend to fix it. And honestly, there’s a compelling argument that, for now, it’s the right thing to do. Fine. But please, cut the deficit faux-hawk schtick.
Because some time in the not-too-distant future, there’ll be a Republican gunning for his job running TV ads featuring these tough-talk soundbites. Then they’ll fill the screen with the deficit numbers of the day, which, barring some kind of miracle, will still be ginormous.
Then, the public will be in on the gag, too.
