The House Republicans want $61 billion in cuts between now and the end of the fiscal year on September 30. The Obama administration says it wants to meet them “half way” by offering cuts amounting to $10.5 billion. That’s a good example of just how bizarre Washington mathematics can be.
Meanwhile, the budget deficit for just the month of February was $223 billion, according to the Washington Times. Monthly deficit figures, to be sure, are not a reliable indicator of the annual deficit, as some months, such as those that have quarterly tax filings, always do much better than others, and some much worse, including February. Last year’s February deficit was $220.9 billion, and February 2009′s was $193.9 billion. But the February trend is discouraging.
The number is horrendous. The first year that the country had an annual deficit as high as $223 billion was 1991. As recently as 2007, the annual deficit was a mere $162 billion, 1.2 percent of the GDP. The CBO predicts that the total budget deficit for 2011 will be north of $1.5 trillion, or more than 10 percent of GDP.
The House seems adamant on big cuts, and there are indications that many Democratic senators up for re-election in 2012 are nervous, to put it mildly, about not appearing serious in confronting the government’s fiscal situation. So Harry Reid is having trouble mustering 51 votes to resist Republican spending cuts. Business economists regard the budget deficit as the country’s leading economic problem, worse than high unemployment.
But President Obama barely mentioned the deficit in his State of the Union speech, while his recently submitted 2012 budget makes no more than a cursory pass at spending restraint and is full of proposed “investments,” such as high-speed rail projects, that almost no one thinks make economic sense. Certainly not George Will.
The late William Safire used to do a New York Times column now and then in which he would put himself inside someone else’s head and “listen” to his thinking on why he was doing what he was doing. I sure wish we still had Bill Safire around to do that now. I, for one, have no idea what Obama is up to here or what his political grand strategy is.
