Meet the New Budget, Worse Than the Old Budget
Congress has passed Obama's budget along party lines. From a San Fran Chronicle account, penned by Reason Contributing Editor Carolyn Lochhead:
"Decisions are liberating," the San Francisco Democrat [Speaker Nancy Pelosi] said. "By deciding to support this budget, members are freeing themselves from past mistakes and stale assumptions. They're unleashing the possibilities of the future."…
So what does budget liberation look like?
Although Democrats trimmed Obama's initial plans and ignored his ideas for offsetting the costs of new programs, the thrust remained largely intact. The Obama budget would borrow an estimated $9.3 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, doubling the public debt as a share of the nation's output from 41 percent to 82 percent. The budget calls for nearly $4 trillion in deficits over the next five years.
And that failed GOP alternative budget, the one that was fiscally responsible?
The GOP alternative, however, rested largely on continuing Bush administration policies that still would have left deficits in the $500 billion range each year. Republicans called for making the Bush tax cuts permanent, slashing corporate and capital gains taxes and hacking two-thirds of the spending from the stimulus measure approved earlier this year. The GOP budget still would have raised borrowing sharply, to 62 percent of the national output over 10 years.
The one upside? Cap-and-trade seems to have been canned, for now at least.
Reason on Obama's budget, which represents a 19 percent increase over 2008 spending, here.
