USA Today: Obama, Congress "AWOL On Fiscal Responsibility"

Monday a USA Today’s editorial headlined,

Our view on the federal budget: Obama, Congress go AWOL on fiscal responsibility

Only thing sorrier than president’s ‘cuts’ is reaction on Capitol Hill,

began - - -

When it comes to federal spending, there's a pattern emerging with President Obama, and it's not a flattering one. The president says all the right things about the importance of getting the deficit under control, but his actions don't come close to matching his rhetoric.

An early sign of the disconnect was his heavily publicized demand last month that his Cabinet secretaries shave $100 million from their administrative budgets. Obama said the cuts would "send a signal that we are serious about how government operates" and would help close the "confidence gap" with skeptical Americans.

Those cuts amounted to a less-than-confidence-inspiring 0.003% of the 2009 budget, or about 3 cents out of every $1,000.

Then, when he unveiled his 2010 budget last week, Obama made a big deal of his demand for $17 billion in cuts, insisting that the cuts "even by Washington standards ... are significant" and that $17 billion is "real money."

The president got it backward. Out in the rest of the world, $17 billion is a ton of money. But in Washington, where the president is proposing to spend $3.6 trillion next year, $17 billion looks puny — a little less than half a percent of the budget, or the equivalent of cutting a $100 grocery bill by handing back a 50-cent pack of gum. …

The rest of the editorial’s here.

USA Today nails it in the editorial’s first paragraph: President Obama does say all the right things about the importance of getting the deficit under control. But he takes no action to back up that talk .

The $17 billion in cuts Obama’s mentioned is all talk. He not proposed a single major cut in federal spending to reach even that miniscule “50-cent pack of gum” goal.

The governments Office of Budget and Management projects the budgets Obama’s putting in place will balloon the federal deficit $7 trillion by 2020. That will be just as the peak of the baby-boom wave of seniors become eligible for Social Security and Medicaid.

And experts tell us not too long after that, the Social Security program will go broke.

All that’s coming our way while Obama and the Dems run up huge deficits to satisfy unions, welfare advocates and other special interests.