Rich Lowry‘s latest column at National Review Online analyzes President Obama’s budget plan.

President Barack Obama loves to talk about how he was open to painful changes in entitlement programs in last year’s private budget talks with Republicans. Oddly enough, his bragged-about courage behind closed doors disappears every time he has to put his vision to paper in the light of day.

His latest budget is built on gimmicks and cheery assumptions that support a massive superstructure of new taxes and new debt. It is a blueprint for national decline, a budget worthy of the Élysée Palace in its fiscal indiscipline, its squeeze on defense, and its assumption of ever-increasing centralized bureaucratic power.

The headline number is $4 trillion in alleged debt reduction over ten years. This figure includes about $1 trillion for the wind-down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that is happening regardless. Only in Washington do you take credit for cutting money you were never going to spend. The budget gets some more deficit reduction by playing games with the so-called baseline, the assumption of what spending will be in future years. All of the legerdemain is tissue for a continued spending spree.

The budget proposes slightly more in spending in fiscal year 2013 than the administration requested in its last budget for the coming year. Over ten years, spending will increase from $3.8 trillion to $5.8 trillion, for $47 trillion total. Spending doesn’t decline in any year. As recently as the end of the Clinton years, spending was about 18 percent of GDP. President Obama plans to spend more than 22 percent of GDP every single year of his hoped-for two terms in office.