Time For Obama And Hill Democrats To Grow Up

With his 2012 spending blueprint, House Budget chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has introduced the only comprehensive federal budget proposal that seriously addresses the nation's dire fiscal challenges, or to put it in terms President Obama seems to prefer, that deserves a place in an adult conversation about those challenges.

Ryan's "roadmap to prosperity" certainly is far more serious than the budget proposal Obama submitted to Congress earlier this year. The Obama plan not only nearly doubled the national debt by 2020, it totally ignored the recommendations of the president's own bipartisan fiscal commission and included nothing about reforming the entitlement programs that are the principal drivers behind our soaring national debt.

Ryan's plan cuts total spending during the coming decade by $6 trillion relative to Obama's proposal. That reductions of this magnitude are being considered shows the gravity of our debt problem. But even Ryan's plan fails to balance the budget by the end of the decade.

If America's fiscal condition is so dire that $6 trillion in spending reductions are not enough to remedy it by 2020, why are Obama and congressional Democrats now threatening to shut down the government in an effort to preserve a paltry $30 billion in unnecessary or otherwise questionable outlays in fiscal 2011?

If the federal government does shut down this weekend, voters should keep in mind how we got to this point in the first place. When the Democrats had large majorities in the Senate and House in the 111th Congress, as well as their own man in the White House, they were obsessed with forcing passage of left-wing ideological milestones like the economic stimulus program, Obamacare, and cap and trade.

As a result, they became the first Congress to fail to approve an annual budget since passage in 1974 of the Budget and Impoundment Control Act.

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