Victor Davis Hanson‘s latest column at National Review Online explains that opposition to President Obama’s budget proposals “reflects genuine puzzlement — and, yes, anger — over a president addicted to debt, who suddenly wants to preach to others about their responsibility to pay back what he once so zealously advocated that we borrow.”
Under Obama, the government over the last two and a half years has borrowed on average about $4 billion each day. That staggering sum is far in excess of the $1.6 billion per day borrowed during the eight-year tenure of George W. Bush, who until Obama had borrowed more than any other peacetime president.
Apparently in Obama’s worldview there are advantages to deficits that would explain his fondness for unprecedented borrowing. In Keynesian terms, massive government red ink is supposed to foster economic prosperity by creating goods and services that the private sector purportedly cannot.
The administration certainly has created an additional 100,000 federal jobs and expanded food stamps to nearly 50 million recipients — and in the process enlarged the pool of potentially grateful constituents. Obama’s belief in the superior wisdom of the state explains why almost all the cabinet secretaries in his administration came out of state or federal government, not from private enterprise.
Massive deficits not only enable more federal hiring and entitlements, but at some point lead to higher taxes. This gorge-the-beast notion is the flip side of the Reagan-era idea of “starving the beast” of big government by cutting federal revenue through reduced taxes.
To Obama, higher taxes are not necessarily bad if they serve to redistribute income from the affluent to the less well-off — a sort of “spread the wealth” government way of addressing the supposedly inherent unfairness of private-sector compensation.
So why has Obama suddenly turned to deficit reduction?
In a word, politics: The downside of massive borrowing finally outweighed the upside of bigger government. The tea-party-inspired midterm election brought Republicans to power in the House of Representatives and scared congressional Democrats silly. That’s why Democrats in the Senate voted unanimously to reject Obama’s record-deficit 2012 budget — the sort of intervention that is the fiscal equivalent of a concerned family forcing a bingeing relative into rehab.
