Obama’s budget: Is he overreaching?

“Sometimes, it turns out, politicians can be taken at their word,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. Barack Obama was regularly derided on the campaign trail for his supposedly empty promises of “change.” But last week, in the form of a gargantuan budget proposal that “reorders the nation’s priorities and changes the relationship between Americans and their government,” he delivered. Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget is a breathtakingly ambitious plan that reinvigorates the notion of “progressive taxation,” by which the wealthy are asked to pay a larger share so government can do more to improve the lives of the vast majority of Americans. As he’d promised during the campaign, Obama also directed that billions more be spent on desperately needed energy and health-care reforms and education. Obama’s budget is already being denounced by some Republicans as “wild-eyed state socialism,” said E.J. Dionne, also in the Post. But the fact is, after three decades of rising inequality, a ��fairer distribution of capitalism’s bounty is essential to repairing a sick economy.”

Fairer distribution? This is nothing less than “the most sweeping expansion of government in decades,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Obama has proposed by far the largest budget in U.S. history, to be funded by the largest tax increase in U.S. history, in the form of heavy new taxes on individuals earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000. At the same time, he would increase the size and scope of government in ways that make LBJ’s Great Society seem modest, starting with a $634 billion “placeholder” to provide millions of uninsured Americans with government-subsidized medical coverage. Unless enfeebled Republicans in Congress can find a way to derail this federal power grab, Americans may wake up in a year or two to find that “they live in a very different country.”

Considering the current state of affairs, that’s not such a scary prospect, said USA Today. There is, in fact, much to like about Obama’s plan, including his willingness to at least begin to tackle the health-care crisis and his understanding that serious federal investments are needed to save our tanking economy. Unfortunately, though, the entire plan is premised on “rosy economic projections” that look unlikely at best—which means that Obama’s promise to cut the federal deficit in half by 2012 is hard to take seriously. That’s the least of his deceptions, said Rich Lowry in the New York Post. Obama keeps talking about how he is determined to give tax relief to the middle class. But his carbon “cap and trade” program would undoubtedly lead to higher energy costs for everyone, regardless of income. It is, in short, “a broad-based (if indirect) tax hike.”

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But let’s give credit where credit is due, said Newsday. In stark contrast to many previous budgets—particularly those submitted by President George W. Bush over the past eight years—the Obama budget is a case study in candor. For the first time, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been included on the balance sheet, rather than written off as a separate “emergency” expenditure. And the Obama budget acknowledges massive budget deficits for several years. “We can argue about whether high earners should pay higher taxes,” or about the need for a national health-care system. But Obama has mostly given it to us straight: The nation needs fixing, and fixing it will be enormously expensive.

While the costs truly are staggering, that’s not what worries me most, said David Brooks in The New York Times. Entailed in Obama’s budget, which attempts to tackle everything from our dependence on foreign oil to the economic crisis, is “a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs.” Republicans, meanwhile, have become so captive to their own ideological purists that they seem utterly incapable of offering a moderate alternative that envisions “limited but energetic government.” Let’s pray that the moderates in both parties can “tamp down the polarizing warfare that is sure to flow from Obama’s über-partisan budget.” That means taking the economic crisis seriously, but not using it “as a cue to focus on every other problem under the sun.”