The New York Times has an interactive graphic breakdown of President Obama's 2011 budget. You can see the whole thing at a glance, and by moving the cursor over a particular spending area you can get a comparison of this year's budget to last year's spending.
It's a useful way to illustrate the magnitude of the problem and where the cuts have to be made.
Mr. Obama's recent defense of his budget was, by all accounts, disingenuous. Most egregiously, he claimed the budget would be in balance by 2015, but there is clearly no year in the next ten when the deficit would be anywhere near closed. By that time the debt will be so high that we will have long since hurtled over the cliff of national default.
He justified his prevarication by not counting payment of interest on the debt incurred by the previous administration as spending. This is a dissimulation. Federal spending is still spending no matter whether we're spending to pay the interest on the debt or spending to build a bridge. And federal spending is still spending no matter which administration incurred the obligation.
With every public appearance Mr. Obama makes it harder to believe anything he tells us. I resist the conclusion that he is fundamentally dishonest, but it becomes less resistable almost every day.
