Shocker: Heritage Foundation Doesn't Like Obama’s Budget

Today, President Barack Obama released his budget for Fiscal Year 2013.  Experts from The Heritage Foundation are analyzing the President’s proposal and offer their reactions, below:

What Would Obama Do?  Insights from his budget
- J.D. Foster

What is President Obama’s vision for America, truly?  What would he intend in a second term if re-elected?  We need not wait for yet another soaring presidential speech to illuminate and clarify. We now have much of the answer to these questions in black and white from his own Administration.  The answer is provided in the Budget he released this morning.  The answer, in short, is more of the same only more, and less.

In summary, Obama’s vision for America according to his own budget is:

-- To add about $3 trillion more in national debt to the roughly $5.5 trillion he added in his first term.
-- To increase federal spending by half a trillion dollars between 2012 and 2016, from $3.8 trillion to $4.3 trillion.
-- To ignore the 2012 budget deficit projected at $1.3 trillion, allow spending to grow substantially in the years immediately following, and then take sterner measures in some distant future – read, he intends to leave the pending fiscal disaster to his successor.
-- To step up his economy-defeating and self-delusional ideological tax hike war.
-- To hope the Congress ignores his tax policies and the economy somehow continues to strengthen on its own.
-- And ultimately to live up to the moniker his predecessor President Clinton tried to of tax-and-spend liberal.

There is more, like a tax plan to turn the ownership of America’s largest companies over to foreign ownership.  Once again the President has trotted out the liberals’ favorite lines about “investment” when referring to huge jumps in infrastructure spending.  The budget also includes a smattering of public relations-oriented micro policies like a community college proposal that give the President a chance to talk about something on the campaign trail, indeed anything, but the real issues facing America.

There is also some good news in the budget.  While spending goes up rapidly over time, there are at least no new efforts to pump up the economy and waste taxpayer dollars with another debt-based stimulus.  Has the Obama Administration learned this will never work, or is the deficit now simply too large for them to try it again?

In truth, a President’s second term is rarely a time of bold initiative and action.  For the most part, it’s a time of marking time, continuing and completing policies laid out in a first term. It is also an exercise of denying the opposition power.  But there have been notable exceptions.

In his second term, President Reagan managed to slow the growth of spending substantially, and to sign into law in 1986 the last great tax reform effort.  President Clinton signed the landmark welfare reform into law, somewhat begrudgingly perhaps and at the point of a Republican policy bayonet perhaps, but he signed it nevertheless.  President Bush tried mightily and failed spectacularly to turn Social Security from a fiscal disaster to a sustainable program for generations to come, but at least he tried.

President Obama’s budget lays bare and strips away any pretense that a second Obama term would be marked by bold leadership to address problems like high unemployment, massive budget deficits, and vital entitlement programs headed for financial disaster of Greek-like proportions.  As this message sinks in, the Administration will no doubt try to establish an alternative narrative of fear-mongering leavened with promised leadership.  But the true picture is painted in black and white in his own Budget.

Budget Further Grows Bureaucracy at Department of Education
- Lindsey Burke

The President’s budget request includes a 3.5 percent increase (over 2012 levels) for the Department of Education – the largest increase of any domestic agency. The Department of Education, a 4,200-person agency, has enjoyed dramatic funding increases year after year in the past three decades since its creation. Unfortunately, schools and families have not enjoyed commensurate increases in student achievement. The bloated bureaucracy has layered red tape on states and school districts, and served as little more than a filing cabinet for the reams of paperwork local schools must complete to demonstrate compliance with the Department’s 151 education programs.

With the release of his 2013 budget request, President Obama is proposing to further grow this “bureaucratic boondoggle” at a time when American taxpayers are calling for fiscal restraint in Washington, including restraint at the Department of Education. The budget includes a $1.7 billion increase over 2012 levels, increasing spending on programs such as Race to the Top ($850 million in new grants), and providing $80 million in federal funding for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) teacher training.

On the higher education front, the proposal includes $8 billion in new spending for the Community College Career Fund, a program designed to expand certification programs and job training at community colleges. The spending will be divided among the Education and Labor Departments over the next three years. Consistent with the Obama administration’s disdain for the sector, for-profit colleges will be prohibited from receiving any of the new grant money.

The President’s proposal also increases the maximum Pell Grant award, and includes a significant increase in the Perkins loan program (from $1 billion to $8 billion) if the loans are reauthorized. It includes a $1 billion higher education “Race to the Top” grant to provide more federal money to traditional universities that keep costs low – a proposal outlined in the President’s State of the Union address. The move, however, will provide zero incentive for colleges to reduce costs in the long-run since, on net, federal spending on college subsidies, grants, and loans will continue to increase.

In all, President Obama’s budget request increases spending at the Department of Education to $69.8 billion. It’s a continuation of the failed policies of the past, and a perennial liberal agenda that claims spending more taxpayer dollars through more and more federal programs will improve education. It hasn’t and it won’t, and this latest increase once again puts taxpayers on the hook for profligate Washington spending that grows bureaucracy while further removing parents from the education decision-making process.