Obama’s Budget vs. Obama’s Stimulus

Conn Carroll / March 12, 2009

George Will writes today:

The administration insists that it really does have a single priority: Everything depends on fixing the economy. But it also says that everything depends on everything: Economic revival requires enactment of the entire liberal wish list of recent decades.

The implausibility of this opportunistic hypothesis is deepened by Obama’s rhetoric, which says “catastrophe” impends unless everything is done simultaneously. But his budget, in effect, says the danger will soon be gone and the new risk will be whiplash from the economy’s sudden acceleration. Although only a small fraction of the supposedly countercyclical stimulus will be spent by the end of the year, the budget assumes that by then the economy will have perked up, and that it will grow robustly — 3.2 percent, 4 percent and 4.6 percent — in the next three years.

To underscore the mendacity of Obama’s contradictory claims, check out these Congressional Budget Office numbers (more…)