On Monday, President Obama released his budget plan for fiscal year 2013. It includes $315 billion more in stimulus spending, which brings to mind two of Albert Einstein's quotes:
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
The budget also increases projected federal spending for FY 2013 by $227 billion, and raises the deficit by $329 billion. Over the longer term, it adds $7 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, despite Obama's claim to be cutting $4 trillion from the deficit. But this is just typical Washington mathematics, which demonstrates an ignorance of differential calculus, because it confuses reducing the value of the derivative of a function with reducing the value of the function. To sum it up, the President's budget would be amusing if the situation were not so dire.
But there are two alternatives that are far more sensible: the budgets proposed by presidential candidates Ron Paul and Gary Johnson. Let us explore these.
The budget plan proposed by Ron Paul can be found here. In it, he cuts $1 trillion in spending in 2013, eliminates five cabinet departments (Energy, HUD, Commerce, Interior, and Education) and zeroes out their funding, abolishes the Transportation Security Administration and corporate subsidies, stops all foreign aid, ends foreign wars, and returns most other spending to 2006 levels. This produces an annual deficit of $313.7 billion for 2013 compared to Obama's $1.3 trillion, and with further cuts, a budget surplus is reached starting in 2015.
Gary Johnson has proposed balancing the budget immediately by cutting spending by 43% across the board. This is not as elegant or as well thought-out as the Paul plan, but it gets the job done in a more appropriate time frame, by doing it immediately.
Here, we have two solid libertarian candidates for President who understand both the nature and the magnitude of what must be done to rein in the greatest threat to our national security: our overwhelming debts and deficits.
Finally, I must mention what is either an example of blatant lies or blatant incompetence. On CNN's State of the Union on Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew said the following:
“But we also need to be honest. You can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes and you can’t get 60 votes without bipartisan support. So unless Republicans are willing to work with Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid is not going to be able to get a budget passed. And I think he was reflecting the reality of that that could be a challenge.”
There are several counterexamples to show the falsehood of this statement. For example, the 2009 budget was passed by a 48-45 vote in the Senate, demonstrating that the requirement is actually just a simple majority of a quorum of voting members. The 2004 budget passed with a 51-50 margin, with Vice President Dick Cheney breaking the tie. Democrats in the Senate may have reasons to have avoided passing a budget since the 2010 budget, such as a desire to avoid politically costly votes or feeling no need to show any fealty to the Constitution they swore to uphold, but a Republican filibuster is not at fault here.
