The age of debt: Barack Obama's first budget promises "fiscal responsibility"--and delivers the opposite.

• Author: de Rugy, Veronique
• Position: Columns

BEWARE WHEN politicians promise "fiscal responsibility." It's pretty much a guarantee that every word that follows the phrase will be a lie. President Barack Obama's first budget, entitled An Era of New Responsibility: Renewing America's Promises, is no exception to this rule. Every page comes with a promise to end budget tricks and save money by reforming procurement and cutting various types of waste, but the actual plan boosts spending and deploys gimmicks galore. If this is a new era, it's one made of debt.

Promise No. I: "While we have inherited record budget deficits and needed to pass a massive recovery and reinvestment plan ... we must begin the hard choices necessary to restore fiscal discipline, cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office, and put our nation on sound fiscal footing."

In fiscal year (FY) 2009, the deficit is projected to be $1.75 trillion. This amount is equal to the entire budget of the United States in FY 2000. The deficit represents 12.3 percent of gross domestic product and results from the federal government spending $3.9 trillion--an increase of 32 percent over 2008--while collecting less than $2.2 trillion in revenue. Most tellingly, the public debt stands at 58.7 percent of GDP, compared to 40.8 percent in 2008.

It is true, as Obama says, that he inherited most of the FY 2009 deficit. It was George W. Bush, with the support of most Republicans in Congress, who engineered a series of expensive bailouts and the federal takeover of the mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But it didn't take long for Obama to add his own billions (see table): $789 billion in "stimulus" (25 percent of which will be spent in 2009), a promise to spend at least another $250 billion to "rescue" more financial institutions, and so on.

To fulfill his promise of "fiscal discipline," the president would have to shave billions off the federal budget. Yet there are no real program cuts in his budget. Instead the president proposes to dramatically boost health care spending and add many new subsidies for energy companies, students, broadband Internet service, high-speed rail, and low-income Americans.

The result is an expansion of the federal government that will persist long after the current spike of stimulus and bailout spending. Based on government data and Obama's proposed outlays through 2019, Figure I shows the dramatic increase in nonmilitary spending as a percentage of gross domestic product between...