In the current news cycles there's talk that President Obama wants to submit budgets that will half the deficit by the time his first term in office has passed. That sounds great. I'm sure it would please a former bleeting sheep that used to haunt this site. What I'm not so sure about is whether he'll really have any success in doing so.
President Obama has one advantage that President George W. Bush had for a brief period of his time in office, a congress controlled by his own party, though I believe that Obama has a bigger majority for his own party than President (G.W.) Bush ever had. Regardless, my point about that advantage is that though it would seem to be an advantage, the President doesn't always find it to be one. Just because your own party controls the congress doesn't mean that the congress will go along with the priorities that you have, which means that the budgets that the President submits may find themselves bloated up by a Congress that absolutely refuses to cut it's own spending.
Oh, sure, Obama will likely find that he can coax tax increases through the Congress, or, if you want to argue semantics a bit, he'll just let some tax cuts that were temporary sunset which means he can claim he didn't raise taxes at all, but instead let taxes revert to old levels. Whatevah! Even without those tax increases, he and his friends in the Congress may very well start finding some new sources of revenue. They'll think outside the box a bit and find somewhere they can raise revenue without generating too many complaints from the masses. Target the fees so that they hit business owners, corporations, 'the rich,' etc. Groups that will get little sympathy from the middle class and the poor.
The problem will be in getting that same congress to cut spending or even cut back on spending anywhere. Obama wouldn't be the first President that has promised to cut spending or reign it in only to find out that congress just can't make themselves tighten the purse strings. The congress-critters know that if they do cut back on spending it means the loss of pork to take back to their own constituents and they find some way to slip that sort of spending into the budget.
Without a line-item veto I don't believe that Obama will have all that much luck in cutting back on any spending himself. There'll be a little I guess, maybe enough to talk about being fiscally responsible, but not enough to really make that much difference. There might also be some creative mathematics done to make it appear that the budget situation is improving, but if everything is taken into account, we'll realize that things aren't really getting better at all.
In anycase, I hope that people keep their eyes on the situation and really do make sure that what is promised is what we get.
