Morning Bell: A Budget for a European Welfare State

Conn Carroll / February 02, 2010

Last Friday, President Barack Obama accepted an invitation from House Republicans to speak and answer questions at the Republican House Issues Conference. During the Q&A period, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) pressed the President: The spending bills that you’ve signed into law, the domestic discretionary spending has been increased by 84 percent. You now want to freeze spending at this elevated level beginning next year. … So my question is, why not start freezing spending now?”

President Obama replied: “The fact of the matter is, is that most of the increases in this year’s budget, this past year’s budget, were not as a consequence of policies that we initiated but instead were built in as a consequence of the automatic stabilizers that kick in because of this enormous recession. So the increase in the budget for this past year was actually predicted before I was even sworn into office and had initiated any policies. … Now, the reason that I’m not proposing the discretionary freeze take into effect this year — we prepared a budget for 2010, it’s now going forward — is, again, I am just listening to the consensus among people who know the economy best. And what they will say is that if you either increase taxes or significantly lowered spending when the economy remains somewhat fragile, that that would have a de-stimulative effect and potentially you’d see a lot of folks losing business, more folks potentially losing jobs. That would be a mistake when the economy has not fully taken off.”

First of all, note that the President never contradicted Rep. Ryan’s factual claim that discretionary spending under President Obama has increased 84%. But more importantly, notice how eagerly the President attempts to make it seem like he had no choice in the matter by shifting the blame for our nation’s deficits to other administrations. Earlier in that same Q&A, the President said he did not want “to re-litigate the past.” Fair enough. Our focus should be on our future policies, and the budget the Obama administration released yesterday is a great place to start. Heritage Foundation fellow Brian Riedl has completed a quick analysis of the budget released yesterday, and this is what President Obama’s policies would do: (more…)