For those of us who are keeping score at home, let's take a look at President Obama's FY2012 budget by the numbers, using what are arguably the two most important bottom-line statistics of all: spending and revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product. These numbers are valuable because they take into account the overall size of the economy; there's a big difference between a nation with a $1 trillion economy and $1.5 trillion deficit and one with a $15 trillion economy and the same deficit.
You can get all the raw data here, but I went ahead and put these two stats in a chart starting with FY2002, the first budget for which President Bush was responsible and ending with FY2016, the final year of projections in President Obama's current budget proposal.
At the macro level, three things jump out.
First, the deficit -- the gap between the red spending line and the blue revenues line -- exploded during the Bush presidency, and it was a function not just of spending, but also of declining revenue thanks to the Bush tax cuts.
Second, President Obama's FY2012 proposal would shrink the deficit, narrowing the gap between spending and revenue that he inherited from the Bush presidency. It accomplishes this by freezing non-defense discretionary spending and by growing revenue by eliminating the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Overall, President Obama's proposal would reduce the deficit to about 3.3% of GDP, down from 10% in Bush's final year and the 2011 estimate of 11%.
Third, despite President Obama's proposal for a non-defense discretionary budget freeze, spending as a share of GDP flatlines in 2015 and begins to grow again in 2016. Although the chart doesn't show this, the biggest factor in that increase are health care costs.
Bottom-line: although there's ample reason to doubt (see Paul Krugman and Digby, for example) that short-term deficit reduction is a worthy priority, for better or for worse, this budget does accomplish that priority. (Whether you believe the budget's assumptions and projections is another issue.)
Nonethless, Republicans are already whining that it doesn't do enough to reduce spending, but while their plan would spend less, it would ultimately create a bigger deficit because they refuse to address the revenue side of the equation.
Moreover, instead of working with Democrats to confront health care costs, which are our biggest long-term deficit problem, Republicans want to repeal health care reform -- putting our fiscal future in even greater jeopardy.
So while there's a good argument to be made that President Obama is overemphasizing the important of short-term deficit reduction, the fact is that Republicans are going to fight tooth-and-nail for a set of priorities that will make fiscal matters even worse, not just over the next five years but in the long-term as well. (And that doesn't even take into account the fact that their policies would target the people who need help the most.)
The fact that Republican priorities will dig us into a deeper fiscal hole shouldn't surprise anybody who was paying attention during the eight years of the Bush presidency. And for anybody who forgot, just look at the chart at the top of this post to see what happens when we try their ideas.