This month, President Obama submitted his budget proposal to Congress for fiscal year 2011.  While his budget serves only as an outline – Congress has jurisdiction over drafting the budget and appropriating federal funding – it sets up his administration’s agenda for the upcoming year.

The president’s budget proposal is the largest in American history, weighing in at a record $3.8 trillion.  Among some of the more shocking aspects of his historic proposal are an additional $282 billion for ‘temporary recovery measures’ over the next three years on top of the $787 billion stimulus package he pushed through Congress last year; $238 million to acquire a state-run prison in Thomson, Illinois to be used to house the terrorists currently being held at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; and a $1 billion cut in agriculture funding that was rebuffed when he proposed it last year.  Even more shocking, this proposal does not include the cost of the potential government takeover of health care, the war supplemental legislation that will be necessary at some point this year, or the $80 billion jobs bill currently being debated in the Senate.  So the $3.8 trillion actually serves as only a spring board for even more federal government spending.

In order to pay for this historic amount of spending, his own administration admits his budget will increase taxes by more than $2 trillion over ten years – and this doesn’t even include the estimated $660 billion cap-and-tax proposal if it passes.  But even that won’t be enough to pay for this massive budget proposal.  After promising the American people during his State of the Union address that he was serious about dealing with our ever burgeoning national debt, the deficit for fiscal year 2010 is expected to reach $1.6 trillion – the largest deficit our country has ever amassed in one fiscal year – and top $1.3 trillion for fiscal year 2011. 

We must return to a practice of fiscal discipline.  Our current national debt of $12.3 trillion dollars equals to about $39,932 for every man, woman and child, or $112,832 per taxpayer.  It is simply unacceptable for our country to amass such tremendous debt and leave our children and grandchildren to pay for it.