Obama budget: Doing the okie- doke on your wallet

The young President calls them tough choices, sharing the sacrifice. But I can assure you it’s nothing of the kind. Bamboozled!

If you are looking for some facts to slap back at your lefty friends when they tell you how painful these budget cuts are in the new Obama budget … here are two great articles and one great interview. First up from John Merline, opinion editor at AOL News. Budget cuts? What budget cuts?

But how deep are these cuts really? Take a closer look, and they turn out to be less than meets the eye.

Consider: President Barack Obama’s 2012 budget proposes to spend $3.48 trillion on everything except interest on the national debt. That’s a 7 percent increase over what the government spent in 2010. And keep in mind that in 2010, there was a lot of stimulus money flying out the door.

If you look at a slightly longer-term picture, the spending cuts start to pale into even greater insignificance. Obama’s budget would have the federal government spendtwice in 2012 what it did just 12 years before. Even after accounting for inflation, that’s a 57 percent increase.

Then he adds this …

But the next time you hear howls of anguish over deep, tough, painful cuts in the federal budget, you might want to ask yourself how you’d feel if you had 7 percent more to spend next year than you did last year.

Then there’s this from Stephen Moore:

To settle that dispute, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin just updated the numbers on how much was appropriated and how big the spending increases were between 2008 and 2010. In Nancy Pelosi’s last two years as Speaker of the House, the non-Defense discretionary spending increased to $537 billion in 2010 from $434 billion in 2008, or 24%.

That’s a lot but not unprecedented, though the story doesn’t end there. You have to add in the stimulus program, which poured an additional $259 billion into these programs and resulted in a record 84% increase in the total domestic discretionary budget under the last Congress. Mr. Ryan describes this as a “massive spending spree that has plunged us deeper into debt.”

What is even more interesting about the analysis is where all the money has gone. The Commerce Department, for example, has seen a 219% rise in its budget. The Environmental Protection Agency is up 130%. The Department of Education, which Democrats say should not absorb even a single dollar of cuts, has enjoyed a 181% spending bonus. The grand winner is the Transportation Department, whose budget has soared by 548%. So much for the “infrastructure crisis.”

Finally no Vicevich post would be complete without a little video. Listen as CK calls the Obama budget for what it is … freezing an astronomical budget at historical highs is not a “cut”. Look out Juan at the end.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj2XpRq616I