The President’s Budget is Out, Punch Line Not Included.

Today, President Obama rolled out his 2012 budget and it is…

…well, you see, it’s…

…okay, I’m kind of stumped for adjectives here. Probably the only good thing I can say about it is that it is big. If you somehow developed a rail gun with which you could bombard cities from orbit, you could use copies of the President’s budget to destroy large swaths of the planet.

Actually, that’s not a bad image, really, because the President’s budget would do to our economy exactly what the budget-firing rail gun would do to anything it struck. Let me hit you with some of the high points:

1. Business investment is the new target as the President wants to raise capital gains taxes to 25 percent and the dividend rate to over 40 percent.
2. “The rich” will see their taxes rise to nearly 40 percent and, thanks to the “Buffet rule”, no household income of a million dollars or more will see a rate less than 30 percent.
3. The $4 trillion in budget “savings” appear to come about via a series of already-enacted laws, fiscal flim-flammery, and not spending on two wars that we wouldn’t have spent money on anyhow in a couple of years.

President Obama seems intent on enacting a progressive wish list that’s heavy on taxes on anyone who might created a job, even accidentally, and wasteful government spending on things you and I could build better, faster, and far more cheaply. I suppose he could do more damage to the economy if he offered an actual bounty on “the rich”, paid for out of a Government Rich People Taxidermy Fund, but I’m not sure he’d get that through Congress, which I suppose is good news.

A number of people have already combed through the budget and posted their observations on Twitter. I collected most of the best tweets into a single easy to read document on Storify that you can get right here. What you need to know is this: Barack Obama’s budget is another massive increase in the size of government that will give us our fourth straight deficit greater than one trillion dollars. By comparison, we had never run a trillion dollar deficit before the 2008-2009 fiscal year. This year’s fiscal atrocity proposed by the President will come in light by at least $1.33 trillion dollars.

What’s worse is that this ridiculously high deficit total is the result of some truly optimistic economic assumptions. For instance, the CBO estimates that our Gross Domestic Product will rise by 1 percent next year. The President assumes a 2.7 percent increase this year and a 3 percent increase next year. Given that his budget, if Congress passes it, will have the same effect on the economy as a brickbat would to the back of my head, that projection is pure fantasy.

We can, perhaps, take consolation in the likelihood that this budget will never pass Congress. The last time the President tried to get one of his progressive dream budgets passed, the Senate rejected it 97-0. No one voted for it; not Chuck Schumer, not Harry Reid, not Barbara Boxer, not any of the Democrats who, by the way, controlled the Senate then and still control it today. Even if the Democrats were interested in passing the President’s bloated budget, Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) has no interest at all in bringing the budget to the floor.

At this point, it’s safe to say that neither the President nor his friends in Congress want to be serious about giving us the room we need to get our country out of the deep recession in which we still remain. His budget is a joke without a punch line, many hundreds of page on which we’ll never find the place where he tells us he’s just fooling and he’ll give us the real, serious budget later. I think we should treat him as the un-serious political animal his proposal today shows him to be.