LAMBRO: Obama’s ambitious agenda

COMMENTARY:

Not long after President Obama was sworn into office, he faced a monstrous $1.8 trillion budget deficit that analysts said would force him to sharply curtail his big-spending agenda.

But Mr. Obama saw the economic recession he inherited as another Great Depression (which it’s not) that demands enactment of a long list of new social programs, the costs of which will drive total federal spending to more than $3.7 trillion in 2010 and add more than $9 trillion to total government debts over the coming decade.

Deficits or no deficits, debts or no debts, Mr. Obama sees no reason to cut back on his ambitious agenda despite the news that an additional tsunami debt wave is about to come crashing down on his presidency.

The Social Security trustees announced this month that the program will begin running out of money in just seven years, and the Medicare trustees said Medicare’s Part A hospital fund will be insolvent one year later.

Saving these programs from financial collapse would be a major task in and of itself. Mr. Obama, however, wants to do it all - including bail out the economy; create a government health care system; pour billions more into education, including a new college-tuition program; and end the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels. And that’s just for starters.

However, analysts, including Democrats, have begun asking whether his wish list involves more spending than a debt-ridden, weakened economy can handle without falling deeper into a financial hole.

“He has wagered his presidency on the proposition that the U.S. budget and political system can simultaneously absorb” the costs of all that he has set forth in a sweeping agenda to expand the size and growth of government, wrote President Clinton’s former chief domestic adviser, Bill Galston, in London’s Sunday Times. “A key question is whether the public will support, and Congress will enact, a program that relies so heavily on the capacity of the national government to serve as an effective instrument of national purpose. This is in part a question of fiscal capacity,” he said.

Norman J. Ornstein, a senior analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, has raised the question of whether Congress is “even capable of handling so many projects at once.”

Mr. Obama’s New Deal agenda is predicated on the dubious belief that we are enduring an economic catastrophe of a kind we have not seen since the Great Depression and that future economic growth can be achieved only by enacting health care, energy reforms and other programs he has proposed.

But Mr. Galston rightly reminded us - and Mr. Obama - that “current circumstances in the United States do not approach the gravity of the situation [Franklin D. Roosevelt] faced when he took office.” The nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), the measure of all our economy produces, “has fallen at an annual rate of about 6 percent from its 2008 peak; by 1933, GDP had fallen nearly 40 percent from four years earlier.”

Unemployment, though severe at 8.9 percent, is up from 4.9 percent a year ago, while 25 percent were jobless in 1933, including 37 percent in the farming sector.

The nation’s economic and fiscal policies need some pro-growth fine-tuning, but not another and even costlier New Deal.

Fortunately, presidents propose and Congresses dispose, and there are some early signs that key parts of Mr. Obama’s agenda have run into resistance, in some cases from the president’s Democratic allies.

Democratic leaders have been forced to significantly modify parts of the administration’s cap-and-trade energy tax bill because it did not have the votes to pass the House. Even with those changes, analysts say the plan may not overcome a filibuster in the Senate, where Midwestern Democrats fear it will hurt their coal-driven economies.

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