President Obama’s proposed $4 trillion budget got a taste of late-night television.
Comedian Jimmy Fallon joked: “Speaking of Obama, [Monday] he presented a $4 trillion budget that he says would help the middle class. And then the middle class said, ‘You know what, how about just giving us $4 trillion? That will help us. We will figure it out. We’ll figure out what to do with it.’
“President Obama unveiled a $4 trillion budget for 2016 that would increase taxes on the wealthy and spend more money on education. He also made a snowball and put it in the oven just to see which of them would last longer.”
To put the president’s $4 trillion budget in perspective, the U.S. population is roughly 320 million people. If the president’s budget was divided among every American, each person would receive $12,500.Counting each American as a one-person unrelated individual, this money alone would put every American over the poverty line of $11,720.
So what do we get with the president’s version of the budget?
Jimmy Fallon hit on two parts of the proposed budget—tax increases, which would amount to $1.6 trillion, and spending increases for education, which would cost $70.7 billion. But the president’s proposed budget also included an $8 billion land grab, $2 trillion in estimated gross spending on Obamacare’s exchange subsidies and Medicaid expansion over the next decade $1.29 billion in climate funding and $4 billion in handouts for states that follow the Clean Power Plan.
Fallon’s jokes deserve a few giggles, but the proposed budget is no laughing matter. The budget raises the current $18 trillion national debt by $6 trillion dollars over the next decade.
Moreover, the president’s budget never balances. It raises taxes by $1.6 trillion over the next decade, but it calls for far more than that in additional spending.
Included in President Obama’s astronomical budget are programs such as government-funded childcare and federal school lunch standards. These programs extend the size, scope, cost and reach of government and should be left to individuals and states to control and finance.
Americans still have reason to smile though. The failure of the budget to address needed reforms and its lack of spending cuts mean it has little chance of surviving congressional review. Experts at The Heritage Foundation say that “to actually usher in a better future for Americans, Congress should disregard this budget and focus on spending reforms that put the budget on a path to balance, to grow the economy and stop the growth in the national debt.”
What if Obama really made that snowball and put it in the oven just to see which lasted longer? Americans should choose the snowball.