How many broken budget promises does President Obama’s new budget represent? A bunch.
Deficits: As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama campaigned against Republican fiscal irresponsibility and promised to get the federal deficit under control. But his proposed budget would add $1.3 trillion in debt—making it the fifth straight year in a row of trillion-dollar-plus deficits.
At least the president can’t claim Republicans crated the problem anymore, not for the 2013 budget. His budget proposal includes all the tax hikes he wants to make things balance—but they don’t. And his prediction that the economy will be growing by 4.1 percent in 2015 will be a broken promise if his proposed tax hikes actually pass.
Tax Reform: As president, Obama set up the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission to examine federal spending and the budget and make recommendations. It did. And while economists and Republicans may not have agreed with everything, there is widespread agreement that lowering tax rates, eliminating most or all tax breaks, and broadening the base would stimulate the economy. Instead, the president’s budget ignores these bipartisan recommendations and goes in exactly the opposite direction: raising the tax rates on some and providing even more tax breaks.
Health Care: As a presidential candidate, and even up to the passage of his health legislation, Obama repeatedly claimed that he would lower health insurance premiums by $2,500 per family by the end of his first term. You don’t hear that claim anymore. In fact, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is brow-beating health insurers that try to raise premiums more than 10 percent in a year—as she did recently with Chicago-based Trustmark. Because health care spending is going up, not down, federal spending on health care will soar.
Ending Crony Capitalism: The president likes to rail against crony capitalism, when the government provides subsidies, tax breaks or other financial goodies to specific industries and private companies. But the Obama administration has proven to be just as bad if not worse than other administrations. The Solyndra failure, after receiving $535 million in taxpayer funding, has gotten the most attention, but there have been many more—and more to come.
And so the question is, with this string of broken promises, why would anyone believe the president will keep his budget promises in a second term?