• OPPOSING VIEW: We take nation out of fiscal peril

The election-year budget President Obama sent to Congress on Monday fails that test. Yes, Obama's budget has a lot of deficit reduction — some $4 trillion over the next 10 years. But the plan would still add $6.7 trillion in deficits over the next decade, with the debt-to-GDP ratio creeping up to about 77% through 2022. Beyond that, long-term figures buried deep inside the budget show the debt would shoot up again after 2022 and just keep going, driven by an aging population and the escalating cost of Social Security and health care.

By comparison, credible proposals from Obama's own deficit-reduction commission and by the Bipartisan Policy Center in 2010 both aimed at reducing the debt to 60% of GDP and keeping it headed down. Obama's plan does not even begin to do that. Nor, for that matter, does it fulfill his 2009 promise to halve the deficit by the end of his first term.

The reason Obama was unable to keep the short-term promise is that the Great Recession was deeper and lasted longer than economists expected three years ago. That development was largely beyond his control. But the reason the president's budget doesn't fix the longer-term problem is that for all its spending cuts and revenue increases, it relies on gimmicks and avoids some problems instead of tackling them.

 

Most glaringly, Obama takes credit for about $850 billion in savings from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were paid for with borrowed money in the first place. These aren't "savings," notes the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "When you finish college, you don't suddenly have thousands of dollars a year to spend elsewhere — in fact, you have to find a way to pay back your loans."

In the problem-avoidance department, the administration continues to pretend that Social Security needs no fixes because it doesn't add to the budget deficit. Really? The administration's own numbers — see page 465 of the Analytical Perspectives released with the budget — show that the program is in the red and will drain the Treasury of half a trillion dollars from 2011 to 2017. Even in Washington, that's serious money.

It's tempting to give Obama a bit of a pass in this election year, considering that Republicans will reject anything he proposes and would use a plan big enough to get the debt under control as a club to beat him with. But this is the president's fourth year in office. If he had been aggressive about long-term debt in years one through three — and hadn't stiff-armed his deficit-reduction panel — the nation might not be where it is today. History shows that presidential leadership is an indispensable factor in any serious attempt to get the federal budget under control.

Everyone serious in Washington knows that the key to defusing the debt bomb is a "grand bargain" that combines cuts in the big entitlement programs with tax increases, and not just on the rich. As long as Republicans remain intransigent on taxes and Democrats balk on entitlement reform, the deficits will keep piling up.

The president and congressional Republicans seem content to wait for voters to settle who's right in this fall's elections. Guess what? Voters always send Washington mixed messages. They want deficit reduction, but they don't want their programs cut or their taxes raised. The only thing that happens when political leaders wait for an election is that they waste another year pandering to that fantasy instead of fixing the problem.