Obama: Know what? Let's spend $4 trillion in 2016

OK fine, it's "only" $3.99 trillion, but you know the blowout budget President Obama is sending to Congress would surely see enough bloat that for the first time in U.S. history we'd be spending $4 trillion before the year is done. You also know it's not happening because surely the GOP Congress is going to counter with its own budget that reflects some modicum of fiscal sanity. (Right, congressional Republicans? Right?)

But even when you make a completely unserious spending proposal that you know perfectly well has no chance of passing, you're still making an important decision. In this case, you're deciding that instead of exercising leadership in working to get America's fiscal ship turned in the right direction, you're going to take your trolling up a notch and force your opponents to say no to as much free crap as possible. Consider a few eye-popping statistics. Not only does $3.99 trillion represent a 7 percent proposed spending increase over the current year, it also would represent a full 25 percent explosion in federal spending since the last year before Obama took office, which was 2008. The last year of the George W. Bush presidency was the first time the federal government spent $3 trillion, and that just barely. We thought spending was excessive then (and it was) but when the Democrats took control of the House and Senate in the 2006 mid-term elections, they were just getting started. It's hard to believe now that in 2007, which was the last year we had a budget crafted by a Republican Congress and signed by a Republican president, the budget deficit was only $192 billion. Obama, Pelosi and Reid led us to five consecutive deficits in excess of $1 trillion, and now they want to throw a party because we're seeing deficits under $600 trillion. But even that is only a very short-term achievement. The Wall Street Journal lays out just how serious are the fiscal challenges we're facing - challenges on which Obama is offering no leadership whatsoever:

---

The great unmentionables in Mr. Obama's budget are entitlements, which roll on largely untouched. The share of the budget that is "mandatory"--not part of annual appropriations--is 15.1% of GDP in 2016 and jumps to 16.6% by 2020, gradually crowding out everything else the government is supposed to do. Medicaid spending will nearly double to $567 billion in 2025 from $301 billion in 2014. Most of that is ObamaCare. Meanwhile, the Social Security "off-budget surplus" that has long financed current spending on everything except retirement is shrinking and goes negative in 2017. This means senior benefits will soon have to be paid out of general tax revenues. These trends explain why deficits are lower for now but start to widen after 2018 despite Mr. Obama's tax increases and economic growth projections of 2.6% on average for the next five years. The Congressional Budget Office predicts 2.4% growth, which means even less revenue. Oh, and even with lower deficits, debt held by the public will be 75% of GDP this year, the highest level since 1950, and up from only 39.3% as recently as 2008.

The political class is so detached from reality, it thinks it's doing something great when it merely slows - and not by all that much - the mounting of public debt. We're quickly approaching $18 trillion in debt we're steamrolling toward $25 trillion by the middle of the next decade, even assuming the rosy growth scenarios of the administration and the CBO. If the new GOP Congress isn't prepared to exercise leadership and explain to the public why we've got to put a restraint on all this, then the 2016 Republican presidential nominee had better. Obama and the Democrats certainly aren't going to. For them, a spending blowout is the only thing to have under any circumstance. If the public can't accept that absolute need to reverse this irresponsibility, it will deserve the national collapse is turning into a virtual guarantee.