Tax, Spend and Regulate!

American Action Forum President Doug Holtz-Eakin on President Obama’s final budget proposal.

DOUG HOLTZ-EAKIN: The President is prioritizing spending. There's no doubt about it. He has a long wish list of new infrastructure, green energy, green transportation projects. He's got $1.2 trillion in new spending proposals alone. And to get that, he's gonna pay some lip service to fiscal reality. And so, he does two things. First of all, he raises an enormous amount of taxes. Over $4 trillion in additional taxes in this budget. That's not something he would have done earlier in his administration. As a lame duck, he's free to have a fantasy of doing that. So that just helps the numbers add up. He also juices the economics a little bit to get some extra revenue. This is a classic tax-and-spend, progressive budget with an economy that somehow is supposed to keep growing despite what they're doing.