Let's Get Serious Mr. President

Now that the president’s budget has been out for about a week, it is time to reach a judgment upon it. What can we say now about the course that President Obama has set for the federal government and, by extension, all the governments of the United States?

I think it is becoming clear. The Obama administration’s budget is an error of strategic proportions.

The Democrats ran in 2008 on a platform that proposed to give government a bigger slice of the Bush prosperity. We had the money for extra health care programs. We had the money for pre-K schooling. We needed to spend big money to revolutionize the energy economy to meet the challenge of global warming. Nobody was thinking about a big financial crisis.

(President Bush probably was. Else why would he nominate Ben Bernanke, an expert on the Great Depression, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and Hank Paulson, Mr. Big from Wall Street, as Treasury Secretary?)

Anyone with half a brain understands that the status quo of 2007-08 has been smashed to smithereens. We are not going to be thinking about nice-to-have social programs in the next few years. We are not going to be whacking away on the oil companies and the coal companies as we bring in beautiful solar farms and wind farms.

No. Anyone with half a brain understands that we are going to be putting the economy back together in the aftermath of the biggest financial hurricane in living memory.

But the president’s budget doesn’t really adjust its spending plans to this reality. His budget shows that it was developed by campaign staffers back in the middle of 2008 before the crash in September when Lehman Brothers went under.

Right now what is needed is to go through all government budgets with a meat axe. What is needed is to release resources being wasted on low-value government programs and to redirect them to more valuable uses in the private economy.

But the Obama administration with its willing accomplices in Congress have just enacted a vast increase in government spending on stupid stuff that doesn’t deliver value to the bottom line.

Right now what is needed is to give substantial marginal tax-rate relief to America’s business leaders—and I mean to the people earning between $250,000 and $1,000,000 per year, the people who run America’s small-to-medium-sized businesses—so that they can improve their cash flow enough to start hiring again.

But the Obama administration is planning big tax increases on America’s business leaders.

How do you spell R-E-A-L-L-Y D-U-M-B?

There is still time for the Obama administration to get it right. But time is running out.

But then there’s this:

• Today I read an article saying that Treasury SecretaryTim Geithner looks like a student pilot trying to fly an F-18.
• And they say that none of the under-secretaries at Treasury have even been nominated yet.

Yes, Mr. President. What exactly is the status of your grand plan to fix the banks and end the financial crisis?