Time for budget restraint

From Postandcourier.com

For most of the past fifty years Congress has preferred to borrow instead of balancing the annual federal budget. That has led to deepening national debt. Americans have recently had warnings, from the Chinese government and other world markets, that our borrowing spree can't go on forever. We can only hope Congress finally gets the message.

President Obama clearly has not. He has just sent Congress his $3.5 trillion budget for the fiscal year that begins on October 1, along with news that he is asking for $17 billion in savings by trimming 121 government programs. The cuts represent just over 1 percent of the $1.4 trillion deficit estimated by the Congressional Budget Office. The interest on these borrowed funds will be an estimated $172 billion, ten times more than the proposed savings.

The cuts proposed by the president are justified. In remarks Thursday he highlighted some: the "obsolete" LORAN navigation system, which has been mostly supplanted by the Global Positioning System; a duplicative National Institute for Literacy; a Department of Education office in Paris; and an alternative engine for the Joint Strike Fighter. The latter is opposed by the Pentagon but has been kept alive for a decade by Congress to help maintain General Electric's jet engine works.

Mr. Obama pointed out, accurately, that $17 billion is "significant" and enough money to fund larger tuition tax credits, additional Pell Grant scholarships and the national park service's annual budget.

But his spending budget grows by a lot more than that, and faster than government revenues. Mr. Obama's fiscal 2010 budget, moreover, is just the down payment on a spending plan that envisions trillions more in debt over the next decade.