The red ink in Obama’s budget

What happened

President Obama this week scrambled to stem growing resistance to his ambitious 2010 budget proposal, after an authoritative report projected massive deficits far into the future. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget would generate deficits of about $1 trillion a year for the next 10 years, for a total of $9.3 trillion between now and 2019. That is about $2.3 trillion more than the White House’s own estimates. “This clearly creates a scenario where the country’s going to go bankrupt,” said Republican Sen. Judd Gregg. Some Democrats also said they would try to pare spending in Obama’s budget and reduce the scope of his signature middle-class tax cuts.

Speaking during his second prime-time press conference, Obama said that large-scale federal investments in health care, alternative energy, and education are necessary for the nation’s long-term prosperity. “The budget I submitted to Congress will build our economic recovery on a stronger foundation,” Obama said, “so that we don’t face another crisis like this 10 or 20 years from now.” At the same time, Obama signaled a willingness to compromise. “We never expected when we printed our budget that they would simply Xerox and vote on it,” he said.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What the editorials said

The “scary” CBO report should be a wake-up call to Obama, said The Washington Post. A massive deficit for the next year is inevitable, because it’s essential to pump money into the economy during this terrible recession. But the CBO forecasts long-term debt that could trigger devastating inflation, devalue the dollar, and undermine international faith in the U.S. economy. The White House’s rosier projections amount to little more than wishful thinking. “Obama should treat the CBO report as an incentive to fulfill his promises to make hard choices on the budget.”

“It’s hard to remember a president who inherited a worse budget fix than Barack Obama,” said the Chicago Tribune. One reason his budget looks so unbalanced is that he’s more honest about his spending than was President Bush, who regularly hid costs with accounting tricks. “Still, Obama studiously avoids the stark choice we face.” To avoid massive deficits for the foreseeable future, we must “increase taxes, curb spending, or both.”

What the columnists said

Blaming Bush is convenient, said Kevin Hassett in National Review. But it’s utterly hypocritical for Democrats to downplay the projected deficits when for eight years “the horrible Bush deficits were the center of Democratic rhetoric.” Yes, Bush’s deficits were a disgrace. But then what are we to make of a projected 10-year budget deficit that’s “bigger than the combined economies of India, Russia, Brazil, Spain, and Canada”?

It’s called politics, said Howard Fineman in Newsweek. Obama is using the financial crisis the same way neoconservatives in the Bush administration used 9/11. Just as the last administration saw 9/11 as an opportunity to push their agenda in Iraq, progressives in this administration see in the economic crisis a chance to institute universal health care, end global warming, and “reverse a generation’s worth of skepticism about the role of government in our lives.” And they just might pull it off.

That’s because Republicans have no new ideas of their own, said E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post. They’re thrilled to be fretting about the deficit, because then they don’t have to deal with issues that actually are on people’s minds, from health care to the soaring cost of college. Obama’s budget reflects his belief that government can address our current economic crisis and build for the future at the same time. If critics have something better to offer, “the burden is on them” to tell us what that is.

What next?

The Democrats who control Congress have already begun to make significant changes to Obama’s budget. A draft bill unveiled by Senate Democrats drops his request to put money aside for future bank bailouts and scales back Obama’s request for a 10 percent increase in nonmilitary federal programs. Obama and his top aides planned to spend several days meeting with key Democrats and trying to find common ground. “The specific details and dollar amounts in this budget will undoubtedly change,” Obama said. “That’s a normal and healthy part of the process.”