The president wants to give you billions of dollars. In debt, that is. In his budget for 2013, President Obama promises voters that, if reelected, his administration will generate a deficit of $2.8 trillion over his next four years in office. That’s a stark contrast to the President Obama who told Americans in 2009 that he would halve the budget deficit by the end of his first term.
On Monday, the President proposed a $901-billion deficit for 2013, larger than the entire national defense budget. That’s supposed to be considered an improvement. The massive 256-page budget proposal reads like an extended campaign speech. In contrast, presidential candidate Ron Paul has outlined a budget of only a few pages that would generate budget surpluses in two years at the federal level. Paul achieves this feat without even touching Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, or federal and military retirement programs.
But take a closer look at the president’s budget and even his meager attempt at deficit reduction loses its appeal. Federal outlays never actually decrease in the administration’s budget; they increase annually—forever. The president bases even this dismal-sounding scenario on rosy predictions of a decade of economic expansion uninterrupted by recession, something almost unheard of in America’s history. Instead of proposing much-needed spending cuts, the president urges growth-stunting tax increases to increase revenues.
If you’re “rich,” the president’s budget has some nasty plans for you. Barack Obama wants your money and will raise your taxes back to the Clinton-era rates to get it. He has singled you out for higher taxes on capital gains. The president will also nearly triple taxes on the dividends many retirees use to fund their living expenses. He will eliminate tax advantages for oil and gas and coal companies, reinstate Super Fund taxes, repeal LIFO accounting, tax carried interest as ordinary income, and more. And perhaps worst of all, the president would like to reinstate the draconian death taxes of 2009. It should be free to die, no? All these nifty tax increases are in the fine print of the president’s budget proposal, where the mainstream media won’t look.
But why should Americans believe the president’s numbers in the first place? In the new budget, the president predicts a deficit of $901 billion for 2013. In last year’s budget, he projected a deficit of $768 billion. What number will he come up with by the end of the year? It’s anyone’s guess.
Increasing taxes on the nation’s small businesses is the wrong way to balance the budget deficit, if the president even intends to balance it at all. The nation needs real cuts in spending, and the only candidate for president today offering a plan to actually cut spending levels in 2013 is Ron Paul.
